Carpe Diem
by Lady Silvamord
Summary: Seize the day. An epic anthology and character study of Konoha's weapons mistress, Tenten. [courage. indomitable spirit. life. twisted humor. love. and all the things that make up a truly unique kunoichi.] Final part up.
1. one

_Carpe Diem_

_Seize the day. An epic anthology and character study of Konoha's weapons mistress, Tenten. (courage. indomitable spirit. life. twisted humor. love. and all the things that make up a truly unique kunoichi. also featuring appearances from the rest of Team Gai.) Fifty themes; fifty short pieces for each – random snapshots from Tenten's life. Five themes per chapter, ten chapters. Part one of ten._

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**Comfort**

There was a time when Tenten was young and idealistic enough to believe that she was unstoppable. She was thirteen, and a newly minted genin, riding high on the confidence that the brand-new Konoha forehead protector that she had been given upon graduation, gave her.

This illusion is shattered on the third mission she shares with the rest of her team, when an enemy shinobi very nearly puts a kunai between her eyes. Her attack evasion skills are usually so much better than this, but she's fighting two on one, and just as she nails one of them with a shuriken to the throat, she spins around to face the other, and for a moment all she sees is the point of the enemy's blade, perilously close to her face.

That is the first of many times her heart skips a beat and she truly believes that she is going to die.

Gai-sensei's well-aimed shuriken throws the kunai off its intended path, and it flies to the side, thudding harmlessly against the trunk of a nearby tree.

That night, Tenten goes home and cries for half an hour; the first time she's done so in more than a year.

Even in her early years as a kunoichi of the Leaf, she learns (the hard way, through blood and death and fear), that _nobody _is unstoppable. She learns this the first time she has to bandage one of her teammates' wounds on the field, when Lee has a gash from shoulder to wrist on his arm, and she holds the bandages with trembling hands as she tries to make the bleeding stop and to bind the wound. All the while she's doing this, she prays that he won't die.

Tenten is not unstoppable, and neither is Lee or Neji or even Gai-sensei, however much she wishes they were.

However, she resolves that she _will _come pretty damn close. No matter how much she has to train, how much she has to sweat, how much she has to _bleed _for it.

(She trains, and sweats, and _bleeds_ more than she had ever thought she would. But she _does, _and that's really all that matters.)

**Kiss**

There are times when shinobi have to use their skills, their _killing arts, _for acts that are less than savory.

Shikamaru once strangled a little girl with his shadow. Hinata lost her virginity to an enemy shinobi when she was fifteen, and had a haunted expression in her snowy eyes for weeks afterward. It was a month before she could do so much as hold a kunai in her hand again without shuddering.

As fate would have it, Tenten has to kill her first kiss. It was a pity, really, she reflected afterward, though the dull ache in her heart. He was kind, and handsome, and not at all the kind of awful boor one would expect the heir to one of the Fire Country's most infamous underground criminal empires to be.

As her team heads back from their mission in silence, Lee and Neji leading the way, Gai-sensei places a hand on her shoulder. His eyes are kind, and not without sympathy.

"I'm _alright,_" Tenten protests immediately, but it sounds weak even to her ears.

"And I'm not saying that you aren't," Gai says hastily, for once sounding fully serious. Silence falls between them. "But maybe it could have worked between you two, if circumstances had been different."

_His name was Akihito, _she thinks immediately, and painfully.

Tenten remembers the stunned, betrayed look in his eyes as she had driven the kunai into his heart.

She is afraid she's going to remember that look for the rest of her life.

**Soft**

Once, Tenten takes her hair out of the two rolls she keeps them twined into. It is not of her own volition – Team Gai has been assigned to infiltrate a party of some sort to gather information about a certain feudal lord, and Gai-sensei has decreed that this means formal wear for the team. It means no spandex whatsoever, and formal robes for the boys.

Lee fidgets in his orange robe, but maintains a respectful silence. Neji, however, is so appalled at the lavender-and-silver robe he is given that after one glance at the mirror, he blurts out that he looks _feminine _and he is most certainly not attending a formal function looking like this.

An already-sweating Gai attempts to reassure the two into some semblance of composure, which isn't helped by Tenten's throwing hair combs at them and seething that _they aren't being forced to wear kimono, and therefore, they have no right to complain, Gai-sensei! If I have to, then so should they! _

Neji catches the first hair comb with the kind of deft reflexes that only a Hyuuga prodigy (albeit a Hyuuga prodigy wearing a heavy lavender robe) can manage. He shoots his reflection another glare. Robe, _right._ _Dress _was more like it. And the frippery curls his dark hair had been rolled into really weren't helping things. Just to soothe his temper, he sticks the comb into his mane, preventing his hair from falling over his left eye in the manner that stylist had deemed was "so very fashionable." He turned one way, then another, still scrutinizing his reflection. Come to think of it, the comb had done wonders…

Neji clears his throat. "Thank you, Tenten," he says, in his usual deadpan. The pandemonium ceases momentarily, in which Gai-sensei, Lee, and Tenten all stare at him, openmouthed.

The thirteen-year-old shrugs irritably. "Well, I feel it does wonders for my image."

With that, he drops back into his seat on the rocking chair, waiting for his team to gather themselves so that they may begin this infernal mission.

Tenten crosses her arms in her deep blue kimono, and gives the mirror another dubious glance. The girl staring back at her doesn't look anything like who she sees on a daily basis – the blue kimono with the embroidered emerald dragons rising up the hem is enough, but her hair, like Neji's, has been forced out of its usual style, and curled gently. It is more than a little strange to feel its long, soft weight against her shoulders and back. Pair that with the cosmetics, and she barely recognizes her reflection.

"Tenten!"

She turns away from the mirror, to find her remaining teammate striking a noble pose – which he can still do, even in the magnificently orange monstrosity he's wearing. "If your reservations about this mission, or the dress code specified by this mission, are born out of any insecurities about your physical appearance—"

Tenten blinks.

"—then, let me assure you, you may breathe easily! The flower of your youth will burn the most brightly and beautifully of any lady at the party tonight!"

At this, Lee falls into a very deep bow that leaves Tenten blushing and more than a little flustered. "Lee—"

When Lee emerges from his bow, he appears to be as flustered as she is. "Right!" he cheers loudly, grabbing her hand. He whirls back to his highly amused sensei and his white-eyed teammate. "Let us depart! Gai-sensei! Neji!"

With that, Lee proceeds to almost drag Tenten out of the room.

Gai takes a deep breath, adjusts the cream silk ties of his robe, and very graciously helps Neji out of his rocking chair, seemingly deaf to Neji's baleful mutterings about why he was being made to wear the _high heels, _too. "This will be a valuable experience, my dear student," he tells Neji blithely. "Already, it has made the flower of youth blossom in Lee and Tenten—"

Neji sighs.

Much later, after the party is over and all of them are struggling out of their formal wear, Tenten is alone in the dressing room she has provided. The kimono has been laid aside, the cosmetics have been washed off, and she is in the process of rebinding her hair. Unbidden, the memory of Lee's earlier speech springs to mind, and a natural blush tints her cheeks.

_The whole speech was quite unnecessary - all he had to do was tell her hair looked soft, really…_

**Pain**

Lee has the unfortunate tendency to land in the hospital a bit more than his teammates. This is because of his recklessness, his inability to sense when he is at his limit, his point-blank refusal to give up when he is a fraction of an inch away from _certain death,_ and his general _stubborn pigheadedness._

At least, this is what Tenten yells at him every time he has such a stint in the hospital. Just about every shinobi in Konoha has witnessed her more vehement chastisements of him, complete with screeching, forehead-poking, and shaking. They witness this and silently thank their deities that they aren't the poor fool in the green spandex.

However atrocious this punishment for "unnecessary injuries sustained to self" may seem to Konoha's general public, in the eyes of Rock Lee, there are worse things. Namely, the look of reproach in her eyes as she sits by his bedside after one of his more serious injuries.

"Tenten—" he begins, but then is overtaken by a coughing fit. "Tenten, please," he says lamely, after half an hour of withering under her gaze while pretending to still be comatose. "Hit me, yell, and shake me, anything. Just not the silent treatment."

She shakes her head, a look of definite sorrow on her face.

"Why?" he moans piteously.

"Lee!" she bursts out, a touch of the old spark back. "Do you expect me to be so considerate of _your _feelings when you insist on doing this to us on a regular basis?"

"…Eh?"

"Every month, Lee, every month at _least, _Neji and I are sitting vigil by your bedside, waiting for you to recover from whatever awful injury you've sustained. Every _month, _Gai-sensei sinks into a depression, wondering if this time is the time you _won't _get better."

"'m sorry," Lee mumbles remorsefully.

Tenten cracks an eye open and glares at him. "If you're _really_ sorry, then you'll promise me you'll stop doing this to yourself – and to us."

"I promise, Tenten," he replies, a wholly sincere expression in the one eye that isn't bandaged. "But in return, you have to promise me that you won't worry so much. I mean, I _can _take care of myself, you know. The flower of my youth has not been fully extinguished!"

"Fine, Lee, you have my word," she lies smoothly, covering up any guilt with a guileless smile. _It's for his own good, anyway, _she reasons. _And for mine. _

**Potatoes**

One of the least-known facts about Maito Gai is that his _absolute_ favorite food is potatoes.

As fate would have it, with Neji's family situation being the way it is, and Lee's being almost as bad, albeit on a slightly more…_normal_…scale, seeing as his parents are civilians, as well as Tenten's mother being absent almost continuously while on missions, Team Gai usually ends up crashing at their sensei's small house for indeterminate periods of time.

Tenten has nothing against this arrangement. The tiny apartment she shares with her mother seems too silent, too lonely, too _empty_, after the countless hours she spends training, eating, and traveling with her teammates. Gai-sensei's house is the exact opposite – it's cluttered with an equal spread of fascinating shinobi weaponry, which Tenten spends hours examining in detail, and random objects, like Gai's collection of stuffed turtles.

Tenten doesn't mind the excessive green or the clutter, though. It's part of what makes it feel a lot like home.

Neji stakes out the least-green room of the house for himself. It is the room that is painted a very pale apple green, contrasting the vivid lime green of the other rooms. Coincidentally, this is also the room that houses the majority of the stuffed turtle collection. Despite this, Neji doesn't complain.

Lee…well, Lee is in his element. Gai has converted one of the small guest rooms into a library of sorts, filled with volumes upon volumes of everything there is to know about ninjutsu, genjutsu, and taijutsu. Lee spends most of his time here, curled up on the squashy orange armchair, buried in encyclopedias detailing advanced taijutsu.

All in all, this is a very comfortable life for Tenten, Neji, and Lee.

…Except for dinner.

One thing they discover relatively early during their stints in Gai-sensei's house is Gai's love for potatoes. Tenten understands. After all, she has a love for dango that Neji and Lee consider completely irrational.

However, Tenten does not insist on eating dango, or some variation of it, for _every damn meal._

Potato salad. Stir-fried potatoes. Potatoes and rice. Boiled potatoes. Fried potatoes. Steamed potatoes. Potato chips. Potatoes tossed with every vegetable imaginable.

Within a few weeks of this, all three of them come to despise potatoes with a burning, fiery passion. Neji and Lee continue to suffer through the potato torture, Neji because it beats the spinach that the Main House insists on serving weekly, and Lee because he believes that there _must_ be a reason for the potato torture, therefore, he determines to continue eating the potatoes, no matter how much distress the small vegetables bring him.

Tenten has no such reservations. After thoroughly researching the dietary benefits of potatoes and finding nothing especially outstanding, she begins to find…creative…usages for the potatoes she doesn't eat.

Gai does weekly cleaning around the house, and when he ventures into Tenten's room one day, armed with all his usual cleaning implements, only to find two carefully sculpted portrayals of Neji and Lee, with assorted kunai and senbon stuck at various points on their bodies, he almost falls down laughing, so amused that he doesn't even have time to be dismayed at the fact that the potato versions of his male students have begun to drip all over the floor.

-

…Before you ask me about pairings, I will say that some of these can be read as NejiTen, some as LeeTen, some as GenTen, and there's one in here that's definitely KankurouTen. And I've only done twenty themes so far.

Reviews appreciated!


	2. two

**Notes: **Thank you very much to everyone who reviewed. :) Five more Ten-and-Team-Gai-drabbles, ranging from pre-timeskip to random, unspecified times during and after the timeskip.

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**Rain**

Hyuuga Neji prides himself on being a secretive type of person.

…Which is why he is less than pleased when, during a stakeout mission during monsoon season, none other than his oh-so-_beloved_ teammate Tenten discovers that he seems to have a strong fondness for splashing around in puddles.

"I believe you misinterpreted what you saw," he says in a monotone over a typically repulsive mission dinner that night. Lee and Gai-sensei are taking the night shift today, which makes it the perfect time to bring up this sensitive subject.

Tenten stabs a piece of chicken with her chopstick and smirks. "Yeah, cause there are _so_ many ways to 'misinterpret' the sight of the great Hyuuga Neji jumping up and down in a puddle."

Neji flushes bright red. "I was not _jumping._ And it was not a _puddle. _I was merely trying to…prevent my feet from getting trapped into the deep mud at the bottom of the flooded ditch I was in."

Tenten gives him a pained look. "The _puddle_ was three feet in diameter, and the water came up to your ankles. There were no sloughs of deep mud or flooded ditches in the equation."

The white-eyed prodigy takes a bite of his dissatisfyingly sour apple. "In this fog, Tenten, people can see things that they're not quite sure of—"

Abandoning the pathetic excuse for a meal in front of her, Tenten slides closer to her teammate, so that their noses are almost touching over the tatami mat.

Neji's eyes widen in an almost comical manner.

"If that's the case," she whispers softly, taking great care to keep her face straight, "about the mud and the ditch and all – then what explanation can you offer for the _overjoyed smile_ on your face?"

Neji opens his mouth and closes it again, genius mind searching frantically for an answer.

"Ah-_hah!_" Tenten fairly screeches, all pretenses of composure thrown out the window. "I knew it!"

Before she can emit another similar shriek, Neji fairly pounces on her, stuffing the sour apple in her mouth in a drastic, but effective attempt at silence. "This goes nowhere," he mutters menacingly. "If you say _anything_, _ever, _about me and puddles, or rain, or jumping, or mud, in the same sentence—"

Tenten spits out the apple and tosses it back at him. "Yeah, yeah," she says dismissively. "You'll poke me to death."

Neji doesn't attempt argument, instead choosing to crawl over to his sleeping roll glumly, so that he can just lie in bed, listen to the rain pound on the thatched roof, and reflect miserably on how he lost the respect of the only one of his sane teammates today.

…Tenten never says anything to anybody about Neji And The Puddle Incident, as she privately refers to it in the solace of her mind. But she smirks at him every time it rains, and there was once he could _swear_ that she pushed him in the direction of a particularly large and tempting puddle, the evening after he had passed his jounin exams.

(Much later that night, after the streets are deserted, Neji indulges himself by jumping in said puddle. Just a little bit. As a reward to himself for all the years of hard training he had put himself to in order to achieve his current rank. Through pure coincidence, and the fact that Sakura had taken her along to a party that night, Tenten gets a picture of Neji And The Puddle, version two point zero. She frames it and puts it in her photo album, and whenever life looks a bit dark, she takes a look at the picture, and laughs quietly to herself.)

**Chocolate**

The first real "team outing" they share is a picnic. Each member of the team is instructed to bring their own (consumable) food item to their clearing on Monday morning, where they will train for half a day, and then eat for the rest of it.

When Gai-sensei proudly tells his new team about this plan, Neji rolls his eyes and declares it a waste of time better spent intensively bettering their skills, Lee gushes extensively and wonders aloud and at length whether his cooking skills are up to the "formidable test of feeding his beloved teammates with luscious edible delights", and Tenten wonders if this is the divine retribution she gets for accidentally killing the plants of the sweet old lady that is her neighbor.

Tenten doesn't go right home after training concludes that evening. She wanders the streets of Konoha, looking around forlornly for things that might allow her to develop cooking skills in two days. Times like this, she wishes that she had someone to teach her how to _do_ this kind of thing.

After two hours of fruitless searching, Tenten finally finds herself outside of the Academy headquarters. A great lot of good _this _building would do her…

Unless. A memory from several years ago hits her, and she blinks at the building, tilting her head.

The next morning, Tenten receives a knock at her door. She's already dressed in her usual pink and green tank top and dark pants, but last night, she had dug out her mother's old apron, which is now tied around her in a rather haphazard fashion. Enthusiastically, she flings the door open, to find just the person she needs – Iruka-sensei, who is holding her note. "Morning, Tenten," he says, smiling a little uncertainly. It wasn't every day he got letters like this. "You needed my help with a chocolate cake?"

On Monday morning, Team Gai brings their assorted edible food items to the training grounds. Neji arrives late, contrary to his usual habits, holding a large platter covered with foil. Lee and Gai-sensei have their green-wrapped platters under the old oak tree, as well as a rather less-suspicious looking offering that he assumes is Tenten's.

Ignoring the questioning look that Tenten gives him, Neji places his plate beside hers, an expression of high dignity on his face. Upon noticing his contribution, Lee and Gai begin to applaud, and he sighs while Tenten laughs.

Later, after a few hours of hard taijutsu training, they are all more than ready to eat, no matter what the quality of the offered food is.

Predictably enough, Gai's potato salad is superb, and Lee demonstrates his ability to make a mean bowl of soba. To his credit, the cookies that Neji reveals are only a little burnt. "I made them myself," he says unnecessarily, seeing as he appears to have burns on his hands that match the ones on his cookies.

As the moment of truth approaches, Tenten has to admit to feeling a little nervous. The frosting on her cake looks a little haphazard, and half of it is in buttercream, and the other half is vanilla. Despite this, however, her team pronounces the cake delicious. Gai praises the effort and the creative frosting scheme, Lee raves about the perfect flavor, and Neji says nothing, but eats two pieces.

Tenten beams.

**Happiness**

For Tenten, happiness is a lot of different things.

On one level, it's the feeling she gets when she hits the center of the target without even aiming. When she successfully immobilizes a target. The rush of exhilaration she feels at successfully completing yet another mission. Some days, it's the heady, giddy feeling of simply _surviving_ from one mission to the next. The knowledge that this isn't going to be the last day she meets Neji in the clearing to hone his Kaiten, or the last time she tries to shake some sense into Lee. It's knowing that she'll still be able to suffer through yet another of Gai-sensei's potato meals next week, or next month.

In a way, that's the kind of happiness that only shinobi can experience. That overwhelming feeling of just being _alive, _when they could just as easily be dead. That feeling of being invincible when she's speeding through the trees, or flying with her twin dragons.

Happiness is smaller, too. Well – not _smaller, _just different. It's seeing Lee and Neji spar together, not fueled by that intense anger and rivalry, but out of simple friendship. It's being able to have them there for her when she needs it.

Above all, though, Tenten is happy knowing that she has a purpose. Her duty to Konoha, her duty to her fellow shinobi, and knowing that she would gladly lay down her life to protect her village and its people.

(Despite her lack of a last name, she has built an identity here, one that is intricately and irrevocably wrapped around the path she has chosen, and that is something she would not trade for the world.)

**Telephone**

Tenten's first real relationship is with Kankurou, the famed puppet master of the Sand.

It isn't anything she imagined that her first relationship would be. First of all, Kankurou asked her out when he traveled to Konoha to prepare for and undergo his jounin exams. At the time, she was preparing for her second try at the chuunin exams. Through a mysterious twist in fate (and Sakura's being detained by the amorous Kiba), Tenten ends up training, alone, with Kankurou.

That's how it started – an apparently one-off thing became thrice-weekly sessions in a nearby forest. Before she knows it, Tenten finds herself quite fascinated with the older teenager. She had never really interacted with males outside of her team before, and Kankurou was certainly…unique.

By the time he is a newly-minted jounin and she a chuunin, he asks her out on a date. Tenten accepts gladly.

Now, as all common sense and logic tells her, there is absolutely _no need_ to inform her teammates and sensei about this latest development in her life. She has just turned sixteen, and she has a right to have a life outside of Team Gai.

However, certain people do not see it the same way. Neji storms up to her one afternoon and demands to know why she isn't available to train with him as often as before. One thing leads to another, and thanks to Neji's intimidation skills, Tenten is blurting out the story of her secret relationship with Kankurou.

That day, Tenten experiences the full force of a Hyuuga Glare. And then, to make matters worse, he turns around and disappears in a puff of smoke, and even though she searches for the next two hours, she still cannot find him.

The next morning when she arrives at training, she is greeted with three identical stony glares, and even as she raises her hand to wave to her teammates and sensei, she curses the fact that male shinobi insist on being so damn _protective_ of their female counterparts.

To his credit, Kankurou withstands Lee and Neji being outright aggressive and unbearable to him, and even though Gai acts as friendly as always, there is a hint of steel in his eyes that hadn't been present before, and Kankurou can't help but feel more than a little afraid.

Truly, Tenten doesn't know half of the things that her teammates do to her boyfriend. She doesn't know about Neji 'happening' to corner Kankurou one night in a dark alleyway, and whispering, menacingly, that if "you break her heart, I'll break your face." Or about how Lee volunteers, despite great bodily risk to himself, to be one of the sparring partners against the jounin exam selectees. When Kankurou is taken to the hospital after his third round, he refuses to tell Tenten about who beat him so badly, citing confidentiality reasons. The weapons mistress fails to notice that Lee is mysteriously missing for three days after said match.

Tenten _does _find out about the time Neji and Lee tap her telephone conversation with Kankurou, though. To this day, Lee blames Neji, because if Neji hadn't snorted at that highly inopportune time of romantic silence, then Tenten wouldn't have found out, and the hugest, and only, fight that Team Gai ever had, could have been averted.

Tenten doesn't speak to either of them for a week after said incident. In response to their more drastic attempts to engage her in conversation, they get sharp, pointy objects thrown at their heads.

The thoroughly enraged kunoichi would have been glad to avoid them for a month, really. However, Neji and Lee do not share that same outlook. Through sheer desperation, they enlist the help of one Nara Shikamaru, and as a result of the ensuing plan, Tenten ends up hanging upside down by the ankle, suspended by the branch of an old oak tree, while her two teammates watch regretfully, albeit from a safe distance.

Once the screaming and yelling have worn out her throat, she simply dangles there. "…What have you boys to say for yourself?" she manages at last.

"Anything that we do for you, Tenten—" Neji says finally, catching her gaze.

"—We do it out of love." finishes Lee dolefully.

"And we are sorry if our actions on the telephone upset you in any way," Neji mumbles in a similar fashion.

Tenten watches the two sorry figures, one austerely clad in Hyuuga robes, and the other wearing hideous green spandex, with an inscrutable expression in her eyes. "Let me down," she says at last.

Feeling no small amount of trepidation, Neji severs the rope with his kunai, and he and Lee both steady their female teammate before she can topple to the ground. Before they can step away slowly, Tenten surprises them both by pulling them into a tight hug.

Neji and Lee blink at each other over Tenten's head.

"You're…not…mad?" Lee chokes out at last.

Tenten gives a muffled giggle against Neji's shoulder. "I was mad enough to castrate you both and hang you upside down on Konoha's gates. But…well…how could I have _stayed _that angry, knowing that you guys just do these twisted things because you care?"

"Right," Neji and Lee chorus weakly.

She breaks away from them, and pats them both on the shoulders. "…But if you ever do that to any of my other boyfriends, I _will _hurt you. Now, let's go get some ramen and put this whole nasty incident behind us."

The other two follow along dutifully, although the entirety of her words doesn't hit Neji until an hour later, when they are all seated at Ichiraku. "…Other boyfriends, Tenten? If that's the case, I believe we need to set down some ground rules—"

Neji is rewarded with a noodle to the ear for his troubles.

**Ears**

As a rule, Team Gai doesn't go out drinking much, despite the fact that Tenten, for one, holds her drinking very well. Her teammates, on the other hand, are a completely different story. Neji has a tendency to pass out after a relatively small amount of anything but the mildest cocktails, and on the occasions he resists fainting, he becomes such a ridiculous drunk that it's safest for all involved that he be locked away from humanity until he is in his right mind again. And Lee…well…Drunken Fist. Enough said.

Tenten is convinced that the downfall of the great Hyuuga Neji will be his inability to drink reasonable amounts of liquor and remain sober. And if another bar is destroyed thanks to the Drunken Fist, Lee will be driven out of Konoha by the enraged owners of eateries and their patrons alike.

They will never admit it, but both Neji and Lee despise Tenten for the fact that no matter what, the kunoichi just _does not get drunk. _She never has to be dragged home, or have Sakura personally brew her up a nasty-tasting anti-hangover solution. She hasn't spilled any embarrassing secrets, stories, or pet names, a la Neji, and she certainly hasn't caused widespread destruction while under the influence, like Lee.

What her teammates don't remember, thankfully, is their first time going out for a drink. They had all been sixteen (underage), and should have known better. But they had successfully completed an A-rank mission without any great injury to their persons, an occasion that merited celebration. It was Tenten's idea, and Lee jumped into it enthusiastically. Neji was just dragged along to make sure that the two of them didn't get into any trouble.

Within an hour, Neji was in a dead faint, Lee was prancing around from table to table doing taijutsu demonstrations and scaring patrons, and Tenten was attracting a large amount of young male jounin, most notably, one Shiranui Genma.

Tenten doesn't remember most of her initial drunk pick-up lines toward Genma, but, knowing her, she just _knows_ that they related to weapons, specifically senbon, in some way. And it just happened to be her luck that Genma was a pervert almost as notorious as the great Jiraiya-sama.

Nothing _happened _between the two, of course, except for Tenten's telling Genma that he had extremely sexy ears, and they were so much cuter than hers.

"I would die for your ears," she told him mournfully, downing yet another shot of vodka. "Mine are…are…-hic-…panda! I have p-p-panda ears and they make me want to _die_!"

At that point, Tenten passed out into his lap.

She woke up the next morning in her bed, having been deposited there by the very considerate Genma. Neji and Lee had been dropped on the floor, with Neji snoring up a storm, seemingly unaware, and a note on Lee's chest saying that the spandex-clad teenager had to be knocked out before being dragged to Tenten's, and that Tenten owned Genma for the loss of three senbon.

Tenten spent the next day with a killer hangover. She spent the days after that raiding Sakura's medical library in search for any way possible to increase alcohol tolerance. Tsunade-sama found her during one of those exploits, and upon listening to the blushing Tenten's explanation, the legendary Tsunade shrugged and told Tenten to do it the old fashioned way – just get drunk every week until your alcohol tolerance edged higher and higher. "It's how I survived, anyway," the blonde Sannin told her with a smirk.

That is how Tenten achieves her current level of near-imperviousness to alcohol. It's something she's extremely proud of.

(Every time she sees Shiranui Genma in the streets, though, he smirks at her mischievously and whispers, "Panda," and Tenten feels like she could go die in the nearest ditch out of sheer mortification.)

-

Reviews appreciated!


	3. three

**Note: **Once again, thanks to everyone who reviewed. You guys rock. :) Five more drabbles, once again ranging from a time of pre-Tenten, to an unspecified point in the future. Eh, this chapter earns the current rating, for themes of not-extremely-graphic violence and sexuality. Yeah.

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**Name**

Tenten's mother is a formidable kunoichi of the Mist in her own right. By the age of sixteen, she has achieved jounin rank.

When she is sixteen and a half, the Mizukage gives her an A-ranked mission involving the seduction of a corrupted shinobi lord of an enemy country. Sayaka accepts the mission, and almost dies during its execution. She succeeds, though, and brings back the man's head to the Mizukage.

Three months later, she discovers she is pregnant.

Her family disowns her as soon as she tells them the news.

There are no provisions for pregnant and unmarried kunoichi, without title or even a family name, in the Village Hidden in the Mist.

Sayaka travels the countryside for a year, staying nights in one inn or another. She goes into labor in the night of the eighth of March, lying on the floor of the forest while attempting to rest her injured ankle. She is not a medic-nin, and she is convinced she and her baby are going to die here. Her last conscious memory, aside from the pain, are the distant voices approaching through the trees.

In the very early hours of the ninth of March, Sayaka wakes up in the arms of a male shinobi, not that much older than she is and with a curious patch covering one eye, cradling her gently as he speeds through the trees. Through the blinding pain in her abdomen, she asks who he is, and he replies that he is the leader of a Konoha ANBU Squad, and she and her baby will be safe soon.

They arrive in the Village Hidden in the Leaves less than an hour later, just in time. She has her baby within the safe confines of Konoha's hospital, aided by a gentle medic-nin with short black hair, who assures her that everything is going to be alright.

The baby girl is born on the ninth of March, one month premature. Sayaka has no illusions about the fact that neither she or her child would have survived if not for the ANBU squad who brought them here.

When the medic asks what the girl is named, for the village records, Sayaka replies, "Tenten," for the fact that they had lived nowhere in particular, just here or there in random places, until now.

Sayaka doesn't give a last name, because she no longer has the right to call herself or her daughter a descendant of the Hoshigaki family.

She kisses her baby girl on the forehead and thinks that it might be too late for her, but she knows, just _knows,_ that Tenten has the power to forge a bright future here.

(She has no idea how right she is.)

**Sensual**

Tenten's one true love is her collection of weaponry.

It doubles as her biggest quirk, and her biggest secret – the feeling she gets when she touches the firm leather handles of her kunai, and the heady scent of metal and leather that emanates from them. The way each kunai fits into her hand so perfectly.

She can caress the blades of her kunai and shuriken, and delight in the sensation of the razor-sharp metal against her fingertips. To her, they are objects of art and beauty, not merely killing weapons.

The tri-sectional staff is one of her favorite weapons. While doing her pattern dances, sometimes, she can get so wrapped up in it that she can hear the whirring metal as it flies inches from her body, and it's almost like they're voices that give her advice, or a little bit of motivation: _go on, push a little harder, a little faster, I _know _you can do it—_

The Souryouushu is, without a doubt, her most beloved technique. Everything about it is just so completely dizzying – especially the _power _she feels when her dragons are twirling her up into the sky, as she is wrapped in their smoky embrace. She loves seeing her weapons spin away from her as she throws them, loves seeing them hit the mark every single time. The thin, nearly-invisible strings that she painstakingly attaches to every weapon are like dozens of phantom touches along her fingers and hands, as she redirects and throws them.

Tenten will never admit to anyone that she experiences a twisted sense of enjoyment at feeling the point of a kunai prick her skin. How much farther does it have to go, what tiny fraction of an inch does the person holding it have to move their wrist, until the point of the metal punctures the skin, and the first drop of blood is drawn?

To her intense displeasure, Shiranui Genma discovers this little condition of hers during one evening he is training her for her impeding jounin exams. She missteps and doesn't notice his trap, and within a moment his arm is around her waist, and he's pulling her very, _very_ close against his chest, with one kunai trained against her throat.

"Wrong move," he whispers into her ear. Another few moments pass, and Genma raises an eyebrow as feels the blood race through her body. "Forgive me for being impudent," he murmurs at last, and Tenten shivers where his senbon brushes her cheek, "but I don't think it's normal to get this…excited…when you're being held at the point of a knife."

Tenten frees herself from his grasp, and turns around to face him, eye-to-eye, mirroring his expression. "You can say it's one of my little hang-ups."

Genma chuckles slightly, and the kunoichi can't help but notice that he's kept the senbon in his mouth the entire time. "One that we had best get rid of before the exams. You can't afford to enjoy the sensation of about being to be killed."

"It's never hurt me before," Tenten retorts.

"It's best to play it safe," replies Genma, shrugging. "You're just lucky nobody's noticed it before. It's fairly obvious to anybody holding the kunai, really. Increase in heart rate, sharper breathing, fidgeting…"

"Which you could all chalk up to nerves at being about to be killed."

"True." Silence. "Then, maybe, I'm just trying to get you to get close to me again."

Tenten raises an eyebrow.

Genma puts his hands up defensively. "Hey, you never know with people like me."

Later, when she's safely at home, away from certain perverted young jounin, and peacefully polishing her weapons, Tenten realizes that in the years that she's seen him, Shiranui Genma has never been seen without that senbon in his mouth.

Of course, that brings all sorts of practical questions to her mind. How does he eat? Drink? Talk effectively? Take a hit? Kiss?

At this point, Tenten calmly puts all her weapons away, and goes into her bathroom, to bang her head against the tiled walls, curse her weaponry fetish, and take a cold shower.

**Death **

As a shinobi, Tenten's seen more than her share of death. That doesn't mean it gets any easier each time it happens.

Thankfully, she's never lost any of her friends, or Gai-sensei. But part of her, the morbid part, knows that it's only a matter of time. How long will it be until Lee or Neji push themselves too far? What if that boy with the spider-style curse seal, or the one with the mutating bones, of the Sound Four, had been just a little stronger? What if the team from the Sand hadn't made it in time?

Her teammates would have been lost. Her boys. Her best friends. They would have left her alone here. And there have been hundreds, _thousands, _of times since then, that she's sat by their bedsides and cried all her tears out, and prayed that they would recover.

They always have…so far. It's why Tenten doesn't trust them on solo missions. Who would take the hits for them, or who would immobilize the other enemy, giving them a chance for a fair fight back? They claim that they're older now, more skilled, and they don't necessarily _need_ that anymore. Neji's the greatest prodigy the Hyuuga clan has ever seen, and Lee has grown into a world-renowned taijutsu specialist.

But even they are not invincible, and Tenten is afraid, _so _afraid for them.

Gai-sensei is one of the most formidable shinobi Tenten has ever met, and she has complete confidence in his skills. She just lives in fear that there's someone out there, an Akatsuki, or another missing-nin, who's has the _pure dumb luck _necessary to ever defeat him.

Tenten is a kunoichi. She prides herself on her courage. It is part of who she is.

Unlike most shinobi, she is afraid of death. Most people in her line of work can think of death and square their shoulders and _accept _that as a part of life, but she can't. She just can't.

Tenten is not afraid of dying.

Tenten is afraid that one day, Lee, or Neji, or Gai-sensei is going to leave the rest of them behind. She has nightmares about the time Neji almost had his arm sliced off, or the time Lee was slashed with a missing-nin's katana, from shoulder to hip. Except in her nightmares, there is no medic-nin to stop the bleeding. Just her, just Tenten, holding their hands and watching them die. Powerless to do anything to stop it.

She sees the life slip away from Lee's animated eyes. She feels Gai-sensei's heart stop beating. She sees Neji's eyes close and feels his last breath, the genius finally defeated.

Tenten always wakes up screaming.

**Sex**

Every kunoichi learns how to seduce a man for his secrets.

Tenten doesn't go on as many "special" kunoichi missions as some of the others. Kurenai-sensei is the most experienced with said missions, so she gets the majority of them. Sakura takes a few, but like Tenten, her skills are considered too _specialized_ for the average special kunoichi mission. Ino and Hinata take the majority of those assignments, Ino because of her Shitenshin ability, and Hinata's Byakugan also serves as a valuable asset for that kind of mission.

It's one of Tenten's insecurities that she might not be as good as seduction as some of her other counterparts. Ino's the natural flirt, Sakura can hide her true feelings behind a glass mask and put up a scarily good pretense of real emotion, and one would be surprised at how many sick, twisted men like shy, unwilling types like Hinata.

Tenten isn't quite comfortable at letting her hair down, or at abandoning her usual clothes for more…revealing…things. She hates the feeling of exposure, of everyone being able to _see _her every physical attribute. Short skirts and low-cut tops offer so little in the way of hiding weaponry. And all the exposed skin – so much for an enemy to target.

Tenten hides rolls of shuriken inside the sleeves of every shirt she owns. Her clothes tend to be loose because she has a lot to hide in them. Even without summoning scrolls, she is her own walking armory.

The first time she has to let her hair down, put too much makeup on her face, don a far-too-short dress, and put on a pair of red stiletto heels, she almost cries.

It happens on a Tuesday evening, the day of her usual get-togethers with the rest of her team, and usually Naruto, Sakura, and whoever else cares to join, at Ichiraku Ramen. She calls Lee and tells him that she isn't able to come, and he asks, in his concerned, sweet, _innocent _voice, if she is alright.

"No," she says, her voice a little higher-pitched than usual. "Just tired."

Lee inquires if she would like him to stop by and bring her a little food, and she declines again, a little more vehemently than she would have liked. But the thought of her teammate seeing her like this is enough to make her sick.

Her target is lounging at the bar, alone, when she arrives. She does everything that Tsunade-sama had instructed her to, sits in the proper seat; shoots him the proper provocative looks. She remembers what Sakura had told her about buying the target a drink and sending it his way, and how to hide her disgust when she walks over to him when he beckons. She utilizes Ino's advice about more physical flirting—"Believe me, it's not going to be your conversation he's attracted to," the younger kunoichi had said darkly. And Hinata had just told her not to be afraid.

Everything goes well. Too well. Within an hour, she's in his room. Within the next, his dead body is on the bed, flecks of his blood are on her skin, and Tenten knows the name of his informant inside Konoha's Council.

She pulls on her too-short dress (which she will burn when she gets home) and slips on her red high heels, and walks out of the room, shutting and locking the door behind her.

The village is deserted by the time she returns, but there is a light, as always, in the Hokage's office, and Tenten makes her report. Tsunade-sama has the traitor's name, and he will be arrested within the hour. She has surely done an important thing for Konoha—all she had to do was fuck someone to get it.

Tenten runs into none other than Genma while leaving. He takes all of it in - the slow pace, the slightly-torn dress, the smudged makeup, the too-high heels. She is too tired to feel anything but a dull sense of shame as he looks at her, and then, wordlessly presses her hand between his own. "All right?" he asks at last.

She laughs wearily. "Not really."

"I'll walk you home," he says, in a tone that brooks no argument.

Too exhausted to argue, she stumbles along in his wake until they finally reach her apartment. Belatedly, she realizes that she hadn't let go of his hand through the entire walk. They stand in her doorway, an odd couple, Genma and his senbon, and her appearance, which she knows must be less than savory by know.

Suddenly, he surprises her by touching her dirty cheek lightly. "Will you be okay?"

Tenten gazes at him as his fingertips trail along her cheek and then drop back to his side self-consciously. "Yeah. I guess."

He looks at her for another moment, and then shakes his head hard. "I'm sorry. It's just that – when my teammate first had to do this, it just about killed me and Raidou. We were like her brothers."

Tenten smiles wearily, remembering Neji and Lee's more overprotective escapades. "Mmm, I have those too."

"You're tired – I should let you go." He steps away from her a little awkwardly. "Good night, Tenten."

She unlocks the door and steps inside before looking back at him. "Hey, Genma?"

He turns back toward her, the ever-present senbon giving a concerned twitch. "Hm?"

"Thanks."

He smiles. "Anytime."

**Touch**

It takes three showers and two sleeping pills for Tenten to forget the indignity of that night. With time, she knows that she will gradually cease to remember the way his hands felt on her body.

However, the feeling of Genma's hand gently cupping her cheek refuses to fade.

Tenten spends hours puzzling about it, before she finally realizes that maybe, she doesn't want it to.

-

Reviews appreciated!

(And yes, this was the promised GenTen. Has the potential for extreme hotness, does it not? XD)


	4. four

**Note: **Thanks to everybody who reviewed. :) You guys rock. These five drabbles take place…at any point after the chuunin exams, and before the beginning of Part II.

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**Weakness**

Tenten never forgets the first time she faces Temari of the Sand in battle. That experience during the chuunin exams was the first time she ever felt the true meaning of humiliation, and pain, and fear.

When she regains consciousness in the hospital afterwards, she is glad that Gai-sensei is the only person there to see her cry.

They talk about her defeat, afterwards, and she is dismayed when he tells her that a wind-using shinobi would always get the upper hand over a weapons specialist.

"The truth is, Tenten, that the weapons in your armory right now – kunai, shuriken, and that kind of standard-issue weaponry – are simply too light to withstand wind attacks. If you want to even stand a chance against somebody like that, you have to rely on completely different weapons."

"Sensei?" asks Tenten curiously.

"Nunchaku. Tri-sectional staffs, chains, the bo, perhaps the ball or sickle and chain, if wielded correctly…you need to use weaponry that is too heavy to be torn away or derailed by chakra-enhanced gusts of wind."

Tenten stretches her sore limbs, and manages a smile. "It looks like it's time to branch out, Gai-sensei."

Her sensei gives her one of his trademark impossibly bright smiles and a thumbs-up. "That's the proper fighting spirit, Tenten!"

As soon as she recovers from her injuries and the residual soreness, Gai gives Tenten the run of his collection of weaponry, pointing out anything that may be particularly useful to her. And so, their training begins.

The first things to show are the bruises. When you mishandle a kunai or a shuriken, you get a prick on the skin and a drop of blood for your troubles. When you mishandle a tri-sectional staff or a chain, you get long, winding purple-and-black marks around your limbs that refuse to fade, and bruised, stiff muscles that refuse to cooperate when you lift the staff again and try to spin it correctly this time.

The third time Tenten hits herself with the nunchaku, she sets the weapons down gently, deliberately, and goes to nurse the spreading bruises on her shoulder.

An hour later, she tries again.

This time, she gets a hairline fracture on her shoulder. She hears her own bone crack, and the resulting scream echoes through the clearing.

She collapses of pain and exhaustion shortly after dragging herself to the hospital. Once her teammates discover where she is, she is treated to a long lecture about the dangers of training alone with unfamiliar weaponry.

"Why did you do it, Tenten?" Neji asks her, later, after the others have gone. He lingers, citing the excuse that he has to visit Hinata in a little while, anyway. "You know better – and we've always trained together."

Tenten shrugs her uninjured shoulder, admitting to him what she hadn't told Lee or even her sensei. "I can train alone with kunai and shuriken and senbon. They've never hurt me like this…and I guess I took my aptitude with weapons for granted. I guess it doesn't apply to this kind of weaponry."

Neji snorts. "Don't be stupid, Tenten." He walks to the door, and turns back to look at her. "You'll need tomorrow to recover. Meet me the day after in the clearing. I'll bring the weapons."

"Neji, no! You should be preparing for the final round, not wasting your time with—"

Neji waves his hand dismissively and steps out.

When she meets him in the clearing, he has an impressive array of weaponry laid out. In response to her inquiry, he merely says that he borrowed a few of the more formidable-looking ones from the Hyuuga armory.

Tenten chooses the bo first, as it is the only one of the present weapons that Neji has any familiarity with. He tells her to watch him, and then performs a stunningly executed pattern dance. She blinks, and he explains that, from the age of five, all Hyuuga children are trained with the bo, in order to help them perfect the Eight Trigrams techniques. "Now," he says, tossing the bo to her. It is solid dark wood, unexpectedly heavy in her hands. "Let's begin."

They do this every day, working their way through the bo, the tri-sectional staff, and chain basics, before Tenten finally puts her foot down and declares that she can't train with him anymore, because his refusal to hone his tactics for the final exam is driving her to distraction.

"As you wish," he replies when she tells him this, with a barely-noticeable roll of his white eyes. "But first," he puts the nunchaku into her hands. "We need to learn this."

Tenten lifts the weapons, feeling no small amount of trepidation. "Are you _sure_?"

"You've already mastered the rounding techniques necessary for the bo, tri-sectional staff, and chain. The nunchaku is the last logical step in this sequence." Neji pauses, and his eyes soften slightly. "Tenten."

"Hm?"

"…Don't be afraid of it."

It takes her three days of constant training before she is able to successfully complete the most basic of the nunchaku patterns, but the groundwork for future improvement has been laid, and there is a definite gleam of satisfaction in Neji and Gai-sensei's eyes, as well as her own, when she spins through the first set without error.

Her training with advanced weaponry continues, month by month, until the day of her second try at the chuunin exams, when Tenten and Temari again face each other.

This time, when Tenten's ball and chain rips through the material of Temari's fan, the agonized cry of the Sand kunoichi echoes throughout the stadium.

That night, at the celebration for all of Team Gai's stunning victories during their respective battles, Tenten gives Neji a hug.

Neji is not used to being hugged by anybody. He turns as red as a tomato and claws his way out of Tenten's embrace. "What was _that_ for?" he hisses, completely shocked.

Tenten grins at him, completely unfazed. "For helping me turn my weakness into a strength."

**Tears**

Tenten sees no weakness in tears. Despite this, she hates crying. She hates the way her throat burns, how her voice shakes, and how nothing in her body or mind seems _stable _when she cries. On top of that, her teammates and sensei have a tendency of running around like chickens with their heads cut off when she even looks like she's about to tear up. So, naturally, she reserves crying for when she is alone in her apartment.

It isn't an uncommon sight for Lee and Gai-sensei to be seen with rivers of passionate tears running down their cheeks as they declare their fervency for youth, but it's just _different_ when they're the ones doing it. And Neji? Well, Neji never cries. If Tenten ever sees so much as the hint of a tear in her teammate's eyes, she _will _believe the apocalypse has arrived.

The first time Tenten sees her sensei cry, really cry, tears of sadness and pain, opposed to the usual ones of joy and youthful fire, they are all gathered around Lee's bedside in the aftermath of his fateful battle with Gaara of the Sand during the chuunin exams.

She had believed that Lee was just going to be temporarily out of commission. Nobody had told her anything different. Now, though, she stares at Gai-sensei disbelievingly, his words still not completely registering in her mind. Lee? Determined, stubborn, fiery Lee, the one who refused to believe that he was any less of a capable shinobi than Neji, despite his lack of skills in ninjutsu and genjutsu? _Impossible, _she wants to say, it's absolutely _impossible _that their Lee is never going to be able to live as a shinobi ever, ever again, and that the medics must be mistaken—

Then she sees the tears slide down Gai-sensei's face, and before she knows it, her knees almost buckle beneath her and she starts to sob.

Neji watches everything, a seemingly impassive expression on his face, before striding out of the room and slamming the door so hard it almost falls off its hinges. When he makes it back to his personal training grounds, he Kaiten's a twenty-foot deep crater into solid bedrock.

Seeing Lee, vibrant, _alive_ Lee, restricted to the confines of his hospital bed is too painful. Seeing his bent and broken legs brings back a rush of heartrending memory of how they used to race through the trees, laughing and calling out to each other, while Neji and Gai-sensei followed at a more sedate pace. The sight of his arms is no better – when they first began to spar together, Tenten had been shocked at how powerful his punches were. When she discovered he had been pulling them, afraid of hurting her, she had shaken him and yelled that if she was the enemy, he couldn't afford to rely on outdated ideas of chivalry. The spandex-clad boy had dubiously asked her if she was very sure. Tenten responded by kicking him in the solar plexus.

Lee's next punch had sent her flying into a tree.

When she opened her eyes again, Lee was peering into her face tentatively, and he picked her up very gently and set her onto her feet again.

Tenten shook her head and suggested they take a break for some ice cream.

The entirety of it seems to hit her over and over again. She is sparring with Neji (like they used to do with Lee), and when he punches her, she trembles and sits down on the spot, and asks Neji in a shaky voice if he really believes that they will never train with Lee again.

Neji says nothing, but he lets her cry on his shoulder.

Later, when she first learns about the surgery that Lee must undergo if he ever wants to regain his life as a shinobi again, she overlooks the risks and encourages him to do it. It's dangerous, yes, but without him by their side, Team Gai is glaringly incomplete.

Team Gai stays the night at Konoha's hospital the day of Lee's surgery. When Tsunade-sama comes out, finally, and informs her, a smile on her weary face, that Lee will survive and make a full recovery, Tenten laughs and cries at the same time until she is a hiccupping mess.

**Speed**

Upon her initiation into Team Gai, Tenten is displeased to note how damn _fast _her two maleteammates are. In her kunoichi classes, she had been the fastest out of the six. Now, she discovers that Neji and Lee are more than capable of beating her into the dust when it comes to speed.

Being reasonable (and slightly paranoid), Tenten knows that her comparative lack of speed can definitely hold her team back in any mission. So she starts to run laps around the training grounds with Lee and Neji, day in and day out.

…No visible result is achieved, aside from her getting awful stitches in her side, terribly achy muscles, and a sore throat and chest from all the gasping for breath.

To tell the truth, Gai is completely bemused as to how the kunoichi on his team isn't benefiting from the tried-and-true training method that had gotten him through his genin and chuunin days. While Neji and Lee's speed is further improved by the daily training, Tenten just seems to be getting worse.

It is out of this state of desperation that he is motivated to voice a Very Notorious Plan to Neji and Lee. Maito Gai is not proud of this Very Notorious Plan; not in the least. It is not one of his prouder moments, and as a result, he will deny any involvement in the ensuing activities for years to come.

The next morning, two masked and cloaked intruders sneak into Tenten's apartment and steal her diary from under her very nose. They snatch the purple-bound book, one of them does a horrible dance around her living room, and then before she can do anything more than reach for her shuriken, both of them hop back out of her window, black-clad blurs racing toward Konoha's East Gate.

At this point, Tenten is convinced that two notorious missing-nin have stolen her diary in an ill-conceived attempt to attain important village secrets, such as Gai-sensei's love for potatoes, and other assorted horrors. She _knows _that this cannot be allowed to happen, and without further ado, she jumps out of her window, racing after the mysterious diary thieves.

The two black-clad figures lead Tenten on a merry chase all over Konoha. It's fifteen minutes into the pursuit that her muscles start protesting and her lungs scream for calmer breathing, but the kunoichi pushes herself further, _for the sake of Konoha. _

This state of events continues for an hour and a half before Tenten, after pushing herself to her limits and fueled by the rage of mysterious masked ninja reading her diary and mocking her innermost wishes, comes close enough to said mysterious masked ninja (better known as Hyuuga Neji and Rock Lee) to almost grab at Lee's cloak. Lee looks at Neji, and without further ado, Neji disappears in a cloud of smoke, leaving the diary to tumble fifty feet to the forest floor below.

Tenten screeches and jumps down rapidly, too distracted by the thought of recovering her diary to remember the other thief. Lee takes advantage of the opportunity to leave the forest and jump into the nearest guard tower, in the process terrifying the three young chuunin in charge of lookout duty.

Later, when Tenten races to the training grounds, she is panting and thoroughly exhausted, but so pumped with adrenaline and exhilaration that she fails to notice the fact that Neji and Lee are sitting stiffly on tree stumps, looking completely worn out. "Guess what, Gai-sensei?" she asks excitedly. "You won't _believe _it, but today morning these two masked _assholes _broke into my apartment and stole my diary—"

A beady drop of sweat runs down Gai-sensei's face, and Neji and Lee look rather offended at the usage of the word "assholes."

"—and then I chased them all around Konoha, and…Gai-sensei? Neji? Lee? Are you guys all right?"

"Perfectly fine, Tenten!" Gai tries to flash his student the usual high-spirited thumbs up and grin, and Neji and Lee echo their mumbled assent.

Lee shoots Neji a look that says clearly, _We're all going to hell._

Disdain aside, Neji flips his hair and communicates back, _Pretty much. _

**Wind**

Tenten really hates wind – any kind of _cold, _in general. True, a lot of her dislike of the element is based at the natural disadvantage she faces when fighting against it, but beyond that, she just feels pure, completely unreasonable dislike of it.

Just her luck, one day comes when her team is assigned to a mission in the extreme northern parts of the Fire Country. Where there just happens to be wind, hail, sleet, and snow. Recon. Three weeks long.

Tenten stares, a stony look of disbelief on her face as she looks at her sensei. "You have _got _to be kidding me."

Gai chuckles nervously and shakes his head.

After he departs, citing the excuse that he has a report to make to Tsunade-sama, Neji and Lee peer tentatively at their teammate. "Tenten?" Lee ventures at last. "Are you all right?"

Tenten flops backwards off her log with a sigh, randomly firing a shuriken into the sky. "Let's put it this way, Lee. If I wasn't the dutiful young kunoichi I am, I would ask somebody to break a few of my bones so that I could get some rest and relaxation in the hospital while you two are freezing it up north."

The shuriken thuds into the ground where Gai had been standing a few minutes before.

Finally, the fateful day comes when Team Gai has to pack their winter clothes and head up north. Lee digs out a decidedly odd-looking green suede trenchcoat and bright yellow snow boots, Neji's fussy great-aunt makes him take along a hideous violet woolen cloak which he resolves to burn at the nearest possible opportunity, cold be damned, and Ino and Sakura drag Tenten shopping for the occasion, which leaves Tenten in possession of a long, sufficiently warm red coat, a pink cloak with little flowers on it, and a large, fluffy lavender scarf.

The last item is on Tenten's insistence, and when she models the entire outfit, Ino and Sakura fall about laughing and declare that she looks like a fashion-challenged member of Akatsuki.

"A _warm, _fashion-challenged member of Akatsuki," Tenten replies haughtily, drawing the coat tighter around her. "And that's all that matters."

The mission is sufficiently insufferable. The cold and constant snow is bad enough, but there is a penetrating _chill _in the air, chilly enough to dampen even Lee's youthful fire somewhat, After one day in the North, Neji begins to cling to his hideous cloak like a lifeline, and Tenten is more than glad that she has all her warm clothing, even though it made the clients look dubiously at her.

It would have gone down in Tenten's mission records as one of the lousiest experiences ever, if not for one saving grace. After they go off duty one day, Gai purchases hot chocolate mix and a large pack of marshmallows, and then Katon's a fire into the rusty fireplace.

Well, maybe sitting with her teammates in a _warm _cabin, drinking hot chocolate and throwing marshmallows at Lee wasn't one of the worst experiences of her life.

**Freedom**

Like most teams, Neji, Lee, and Tenten have a certain element of healthy competitiveness in their relationship.

…Well, maybe Neji and Lee's competitiveness borders on _obsessive _and slightly weird. But mostly, they function in the realm of normalcy.

Lee might not be able to beat Neji in taijutsu yet. They aren't quite evenly matched, after all, not with the advantage granted to Neji with his bloodline limit.

So when it comes to settling differences or even random challenges, they usually rely on a simple race. First person from one end to the forest to the other wins.

Tenten usually participates in said races, not because she has some ridiculous score to settle with her teammates (not _usually, _anyway), but just for the joy of it.

She doesn't care about speed, not really. Her run-in with the two diary-stealing ninja did a lot to build up her speed and endurance, and now she's fairly matched with Neji and Lee. That aside, though, flying through the treetops, pushing off on branches, and feeling the comforting tingle of the chakra that is centered in her feet is one of the greatest exhilarations of Tenten's life. The air is sharp and cold, and each gust is like a slap against her face. It brings tears to her eyes, spurring her on at the times when she feels like she needs to stop and rest.

Times like this, she feels like she could outrun anything, and that she is even more free than the wind.

Usually after their races, all of them end up lying on the soft grass of the meadow outside the forest, gasping for breath. Today, Tenten has beaten Neji and Lee, soaring out into the meadow before either of them.

"What motivates you?" Neji asks grumpily, ripping the head off a dandelion.

Tenten smiles brilliantly, gazing up at the blue, blue sky. "Everything."

¤

Reviews appreciated!


	5. five

**Note: **Thank you very much to everybody who reviewed. Five more Ten-drabbles, all post-timeskip.

¤

**Life**

Sometimes, when life gets to be too much, Tenten needs a break.

…No, she doesn't idly _wish _for a break between throttling enemy ninja or making sure Neji and Lee don't get themselves killed. She _needs_ a break like an Akimichi needs his five daily meals.

And, for those who don't know, is a lot.

Unfortunately, in the busy schedule of every shinobi, there is very little time, if any, allowed for taking a break and heading off for a pleasant weekend spa trip to soak in a hot spring. So the weapons mistress must settle for the next best thing.

Here's to finding out what that 'next best thing' may be.

Despite Neji's generous offer, the Hyuuga courtyard isn't the best choice. Too many little white-eyed Hyuugas running around and hiding behind the willow tree in the courtyard while "secretively observing" the brown-eyed newcomer. After the third set of toy shuriken gets stuck in her hair, Tenten fairly runs out of the manor gates, chased by a screaming line of mini Hyuuga.

_It's a good thing they grow out of it, _she reflects later, as she pulls out the senbon that hold her tightly twisted buns together. Her hair falls out of the carefully arranged style – two toy shuriken with it. They land in the small, chubby hands of the nearest baby Hyuuga, and he beams at Tenten joyfully. The weapons mistress can't help but smile back. "Now run along, off with you guys."

The horde of white-eyed children dash back to their home quite contentedly, crushing Tenten's dream of a peaceful afternoon beneath their little feet.

Next stop: The Akimichi orchard. Chouza and his sweet wife have always liked her, ever since when she was a little Academy student willing to water the contents of the orchard in return for a few chocolate chip cookies on her way back home from school.

For a time, Tenten thinks that the orchard is perfect. Relatively quiet, peaceful, fragrant, huge trees ideal for lazing under…

Then Chouji comes out back and they talk, for the first time since he returned from his mission in the Land of the Mist. He insists that she stay for dinner, and as Tenten enters the Akimichi kitchen for the first time in years, her eyes can't help but widen at the sight of the biggest spread of food that she's ever seen in her entire life.

It is an hour before a thoroughly stuffed Tenten emerges from the Akimichi household, thanking everybody profusely, but declining the offer of a third helping of dessert. She fairly has to claw her way home, seeing as this is the fullest she's felt in _years. _

No more orchard, she decides, lying in bed that night and still feeling deliciously full. _Way _too much temptation. After all, she had forgotten just how delicious Mama Akimichi's chocolate chip cookies are.

In the day that follows, Tenten nixes the Yamanaka flower shop – too much of Ino trying to set her up with every male patron who walks in the door. When Jiraiya, of all people, strolls in, waggling his eyebrows at the two young ladies, Tenten runs out. She toys with the idea of Sakura's quiet, peaceful office, but then decides that she and her compatriots spend far too much time in the hospital for her liking anyway. A weaponry shop would have been the next logical choice, but her presence in the local stores seems to terrify the owners into bowing and scraping their heads at her feet. Tenten despairs.

By sunset, Tenten is lying on her back on the concrete roof of the ANBU headquarters, wondering if she'll ever get her break. She closes her eyes, basking in the glow of sunlight. After a while, she concludes that this is actually rather relaxing. All she has to do is hope that no patrolling ANBU mistake her for a dead body—

Almost at the instant that this thought hits, Tenten's eyes fly wide open and very startled – and with good reason.

"Ah!" she yelps, jumping up and pointing a finger at the intruder upon her personal space. "It's _you!_"

Shiranui Genma raises an eyebrow, settling back in his kneeling position. "Should I be offended by this greeting, or is it a custom thing for you?"

Tenten offers him a slightly abashed smile, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear. "Eh, I'm sorry. I was just…unaware, that's all. It was a bit of a shock." The moment passes, and then she glares at him again. "Is it a custom thing for _you_ to approach people on the roofs of buildings and stick your face an inch from theirs?"

Genma considers this. "No. I think it's just you."

"…Lucky me."

"Oh, you have no idea." The irrepressible young man offers her a grin. "And what exactly are you doing _trespassing _upon the roof of the ANBU building?"

Tenten drops back down to a kneeling position, so that they are both facing each other across the last thin sliver of sunlight. Before she knows it, she's spilling out the whole pathetic story, about mission stress and life getting to be too much, and how there's nowhere for her to go to get away from it all.

Genma listens with a straight face throughout the whole tale. When she's finished, he nods sagely. "If you ask me, I don't think you've been looking in the right places."

Tenten looks up at him. "Right places? Where?"

Genma stands up, and holds a hand out to help her up. "Come with me to dinner, and I'll show you."

It takes a few seconds for Tenten to realize that she's just been shamelessly led into a date, and on top of that, he's still holding her hand, and wearing a cheeky _I'm-so-awesome_ grin to boot. Her mouth opens and closes disbelievingly, and then she sighs, unable to hold back a smile. "Fine."

If Genma was any less awesome, he would have to do a victory lap around the roof and compose a song in tribute of his own awesomeness, but he restrains himself for Tenten's sake.

Later, sitting in the branches of undoubtedly the tallest tree Tenten has ever seen in her life, she has to admit that it had been a fittingly awesome date. The dinner was great, and she had seen with her _very own eyes _how possible it was to eat with a senbon sticking out of one's mouth. And then he had brought her here, to the highest stable branch of the tallest tree in Konoha's forest, and that's where they sit now, eating fortune cookies Genma mysteriously pulls out from a pocket in his jounin vest, and naming constellations.

"This is amazing," she admits, leaning against his side.

He nods agreement. "Our sensei used to train us here in this very forest – this is the first tree I ever walked up. Raidou and I used to _Henge _ourselves into branches on this thing when we felt the need to agitate Shizune and our sensei."

Tenten laughs. "You two sounded like…a handful."

"That's the polite way to put it," he agrees ruefully.

Genma looks at the weapons mistress for a moment, her profile silhouetted against the silver stars. He opens his mouth to say something, but then she grabs his hand, pointing off into the distance excitedly. "Look, a shooting star!"

The star is oddly prominent as it streaks across the night sky, leaving a trail of glowing silver behind it. "So it is. Make a wish?"

Tenten considers for a moment. Then, she kisses him on the cheek.

Genma blushes the reddest she's ever seen on a human being.

The next morning, when Tenten meets her teammates and sensei before their scheduled mission, she has a senbon precariously stuck in the corner of her mouth.

Neji, Lee, and Gai-sensei stare. "So it's true," Gai-sensei murmurs wonderingly. "Tenten, my beloved student! You have finally found the joy of the eternal sunny summers of love!"

Lee groans.

Neji goes and finds a tree he can bang his head against.

Tenten smiles.

**Devotion **

It had to happen eventually, Tenten reasons. She, Lee, and Neji are all fully capable and qualified jounin, and undoubtedly one of the most close-knit teams that the village has ever seen. And yet, Lee and Neji are taking quite some time to get used to the idea of Tenten – _their _Tenten – having a real significant other in her life.

True, they have all matured, and the current state of events is nowhere near as awful it had been when she had first started dating Kankurou. Now, instead of forcibly trying to split her and Genma apart, Neji and Lee merely sulk.

One night, Tenten takes them both out to dinner with her, to the old dango place. This was where they had first ate lunch together as a genin team, a little more than ten years ago now. She remembers with a pang, how _young_ they had been, and how much all of them have changed…or haven't.

Suddenly, Tenten takes Lee's hand in one of hers, and Neji's in the other. Neji tenses up at first, but slowly relaxes. "Guys?" she asks. "You know that we're _always _going to be best friends, right?"

This is a ritual they go through at least once a year, and instead of the usual enthusiastic responses (a loud cheer from Lee and a more emphatic "hn" than usual from Neji), this year she simply gets mumbles of assent.

Tenten frowns, and then pokes first Lee, then Neji, in the chest with her empty dango stick. "Okay, you two. What's going on?"

To her surprise, Neji voices his opinion first. "It's just a little difficult to get used to, that's all."

"Everything is changing," Lee agrees glumly. "We're not the young genin or chuunin we used to be. Neji is due to be installed as ANBU captain by summer's end, I am taking my first genin team within the month, and you have been offered a spot as an Academy instructor, as well as discovering the summertime of love. I feel as if we are leaving our springtime of youth behind."

"Entering uncharted waters," Neji chips in.

Tenten remains silent, stirring her lemonade. As much she hates to admit it, Lee really had hit something on the head. The realization startles her – "This is the unofficial end of Team Gai," she says, shocked, "isn't it?"

"In reflection, our team is one of the last to disband," Neji contemplates aloud. "Team Seven met its end a decade ago, with the Uchiha's defection and Naruto and Sakura moving on to specialize in totally different things. Hinata-sama, Kiba, and Shino are a rarity – they continue to take missions together as a jounin team. They were the most finely crafted team of the former Rookie Nine, and that hasn't changed, even now. Shikamaru is the Hokage's head tactician, Ino has been training under Morino Ibiki in interrogation for a year now, and Chouji has proved himself one of the village's most capable jounin-sensei."

They sit in silence for a few moments. "But…that hasn't really changed anything," Lee says, as something dawns on him. "The friendship that each team shares has been unaffected by the change in the original dynamic."

"Our bonds are too strong to break." Tenten murmurs. "What we've been through together, everything…we're best friends – well, more than that, of course - and nothing can change that."

"Of course, the interconnected strings of our fates will never really diverge," muses Neji.

Lee laughs a little shakily. "I wonder if our teachers at the Academy really know that, when they put together the genin teams, that they are making the ties of friendship that we will live and die by."

"It's a sobering thought," agrees Tenten. She picks up her glass. "I would like to propose a toast. To Team Gai, to our friendship, to the rest of our lives together – and apart."

Neji and Lee lift their glasses and murmur their assent.

Later, as they all part ways to walk to their individual homes, Tenten realizes that maybe; it was stupid to be worried. Because, out of the few constants of her life, she knows that Team Gai, and their devotion to one another, will always live on, no matter what else life throws at them.

**Jealousy**

Tenten stops by to visit Lee on the afternoon he is due to meet the three new genin that will become his team for the years to come. In the tradition of Gai-sensei, Lee has insisted that his team not be assigned a number.

Remembering her own genin days, the weapons mistress has to admit that she feels a little sorry for the kids who have to get used to being called "Team Lee."

Deciding to put on a little show for the kids' expense, Tenten appears at Lee's side in a swirl of green leaves, right in the middle of his very…youthful and enthusiastic introduction. Upon noticing the assorted gasps, Lee spins around and promptly tackles Tenten in a hug, before introducing his new students to the "illustrious and youthful Tenten-sensei, esteemed weapons mistress of Konoha!"

Tenten admits to feeling slightly gratified at the looks of wide-eyed amazement on the genin's faces.

She excuses herself shortly after, and simply watches proceedings from a high branch on a nearby tree. She realizes that she can't stop smiling, even though there is an oddly unfamiliar ache in her the pit of her stomach.

After Lee dismisses the genin, he waves up at her, and she jumps down before hugging him tightly again. "You were amazing, Lee-sensei," she attempts a smile. "I…it was just like being back here so long ago, listening to Gai-sensei."

Lee holds her away from him at arm's length, giving her a critical look. "Tenten? Are you quite alright?"

She hugs him again, and this time he can definitely hear a stifled sob against his shoulder. "Lee, is it completely stupid to be jealous of three little genin?" she sniffles at last.

Lee wipes the tears away from her cheeks gently. "No, it isn't. Not in the least."

After apologizing for crying all over his green spandex, Tenten wanders off, and without even consciously realizing it, ends up waiting at the ANBU office, just as Genma is wandering in after his coffee break. Noticing her red-tinged eyes, he wraps an arm around her comfortingly and kisses the top of her head. "What's wrong, Ten?"

Tenten looks up at him, squares her shoulders, and makes her decision. "I need to see Tsunade-sama about taking a genin team."

Genma looks at her, remembers what day it is, and understands. "You'll have to wait until the next graduation period, of course, but I'll take you down to see her right away."

Tenten manages a smile. "Thank you."

**Hands**

When Genma proposes, on the one year anniversary of their first date, Tenten's first logical thought after she says yes, and stops sniffling, in that order, is wondering how having a ring on her finger is going to affect her execution of weapons' techniques, if any.

The diamond ring fits on her finger perfectly – it isn't too tight, but it doesn't slip even a fraction of a centimeter as she goes through her nunchaku patterns.

Tenten still worries about it, though. She has never worn any article of jewelry in her life, even though her ears were pierced as a baby. Most kunoichi don't, in the fear that it will either hold them back in battle, could be used against them (Kurenai was almost strangled with her necklace as a chuunin), or become damaged on the field.

Seeing as the ring is perfectly battle-efficient – Genma even pointed out how much it would hurt if she punched or backhanded an enemy with her ring hand, and Tenten cannot think of any plausible scenario in which an enemy could use it against her, the only remaining problem is that the ring has quickly become one of her most treasured possessions outside her weaponry, and she can't stand to think of it being damaged in any way.

After puzzling over the issue for quite some time, Tenten mentions it to Sakura in passing conversation one day, and the medic-nin blinks. "Well, that's simple," she points out. "I can put a small shield of my chakra around it, so that it can withstand physical and weapons-related blows."

Tenten hugs Sakura and proclaims her a genius.

They go to her office afterward, Tenten takes a seat as Sakura puts on her white coat before sitting down across from her. "Here, may I see your hands?"

Tenten holds them out dutifully, and as Sakura centers a small ball of chakra in her palm, Tenten notices her own hands for the first time in – well, maybe forever. They are quite small, but callused from years of holding kunai and shuriken, and strong enough to block even the most powerful blows effectively. Her fingers are crisscrossed with tiny white scars, where the points of her weapons had met her skin.

Sakura molds the ball of chakra into a flat disc, gently lifting Tenten's ring hand up. Slowly, she guides the disc over the ring finger, and Tenten can feel the tingle of power that accompanies Sakura's chakra. The glowing green chakra disc settles over her ring, and seals, becoming completely transparent. Tenten blinks, curling the hand into her fist. She feels no real difference, except a slight thrumming over her ring.

"And that's it." Sakura smiles, pushing her chair away from her desk and standing up. "The ring will come on and off without any problem, although the shield won't dissolve."

"Thank you _so _much!" exclaims Tenten.

The medic-nin demurs. "Your ring is absolutely gorgeous, Tenten. You really are lucky."

Tenten doesn't miss the slightly wistful look in Sakura's eyes, and she raises an eyebrow mischievously, even as she lifts her hands up to make the beginnings of her disappearing jutsu. "Hey, Sakura?"

"Hm?"

"Don't worry. Neji will come around."

Sakura's jaw drops, and before she can stutter out a completely unconvincing denial of knowing what Tenten's talking about, the weapons mistress has already disappeared in a swirl of green leaves, although her laughter echoes around Sakura's office.

**Taste**

It's the end of the year already, and there is, as usual, a party for all of Konoha's jounin on New Year's Eve. The mood is celebratory as always, but Tenten thinks that it might be a little more than that.

Lee has decided to enter his team of genin into the upcoming chuunin exams, and he is more than confident that every single one of them will do well. Right now, he and Gai-sensei are quite seriously comparing pre-exam training methods, Lee earnestly taking notes on his small notepad, and seeming not to notice Yamanaka Ino making eyes at him across the room. Tenten really hasn't thought of it that way prior to her talk with Ino, but apparently the green spandex displays his "toned, muscular physique" in a spectacular fashion.

Neji is doing as successfully as ever as ANBU Captain, but it's not that that concerns Tenten. He and Sakura have looked very close to holding hands at a couple of times during the night, and Tsunade has an office-wide pool going that tonight's the night they become official.

In the ten seconds before the clock strikes midnight, Tenten is standing next to Genma by the window. Neji, Sakura, Lee, Ino, and Gai-sensei wander over as well, and listening to their casual conversation, Tenten tilts her head up to the sky and her smile widens in anticipation of the year to come.

She can almost taste the new beginnings.

**¤**

Genma is fittingly awesome, no? XD (and never fear alt-pairing fans, there will still beNejiTen and LeeTen in the following chapters.)

Reviews appreciated.


	6. six

**Note: **Thank you to everyone who reviewed. These drabbles are just kind of randomly scattered around the life of Tenten up until the age of sixteen or such.

¤

**Forever**

Tenten is one year old when she holds her first real kunai.

She is three when she first throws it into the dead center of the target.

Her mother enrolls her in the Academy when she is five, and her instructors note the girl's uncanny accuracy, even at that young age.

Tenten is a genin at twelve.

It takes her fourteen years to completely master the art of wielding of almost every single implement of shinobi weaponry. That is when she makes chuunin.

She passes the jounin exams on her first try, at twenty years of age. It is another four years before she takes her first genin team, and begins to pass on her knowledge to the next generation.

At twenty-five, Tenten will be offered a position as an ANBU assassin. Within the next two years, she will become one of the leading experts in that field.

Eight steps on the long path to achieving a dream.

(Tenten _knew, _by the time she was twelve and standing between Neji and Lee, looking up at her new sensei with shining eyes, for the very first time, that this was what she wanted to do for the rest of her life.)

**Blood**

Prior to her first mission, all the experience that Tenten had with blood came with the few pricks and scratches she would get while working with her weapons.

The first time she sees a kunai pierce a man's heart, she stays standing straight and tall and keeps her eyes focused on the enemy-nin's empty eyes, not the gaping, ragged hole in his chest with the leather handle of Gai-sensei's kunai protruding from it.

Then little drops of his blood land on her arm, and it all seems to _hit _her.

Tenten staggers away and vomits into the bushes.

Lee and Neji avoid her gaze for the remaining part of the mission.

It isn't that she is _afraid _of it, most definitely not. She can handle blood in small quantities; all good shinobi must. It's just that seeing so much of it disturbs her. The strange, metallic smell, the slipperiness of it beneath her hands, and almost as bad – the ragged, torn area of skin that surrounds the entrance wound. It's enough to make her shudder.

Once, Lee gets slashed on the field. It's a monster of a cut – shoulder to wrist. The mere sight of it is enough to make Tenten want to vomit, or faint, or run away, or all three, but it's _Lee _screaming in agony, and her who has the bandages fastened onto her belt, and Neji who's doing his best to protect all three of them, despite increasing odds.

Tenten will never forget the horrifying experience of holding Lee's arm together in her own bare hands. Or what it looks – and feels – like to have his blood on her hands.

The bandaging is haphazard, and within minutes the first few layers have already soaked through with blood. But those few minutes have saved him from bleeding to death, and it's enough time for Neji to grab her arm and her to grab Lee's hand, and for all three of them to run for their lives out of the blood-soaked forest.

They meet up with Gai-sensei, and the four of them take refuge in an isolated cave. Their sensei rebandages Lee's injured arm, while Tenten tries to wash the blood off her. She's fairly soaked in it up to the elbows, and there are splatters of it on her shirt as well.

Within five minutes, she feels so hopeless that she throws herself into the river and anchors herself to a rock, letting the raging current sweep the ribbons of red away from her body and clothes.

Her physical being is clean at last, and she's sitting against the wall of the cave and shivering. Neji comes over, at last, and throws a rough blanket over her, before sitting down as well. "At least it's off you now," he says.

Tenten holds her hands out to him, and he can see the haunted look in her eyes without the aid of the Byakugan. "I can't get the feeling away," she whispers, and he wonders what it's like to hold two pieces of your teammate's arm.

A little awkwardly, he takes her hands in his own, and tells her that it's going to be all right.

Tenten concentrates on Neji's hands in hers; holding them safe, warm, together. Feeling a little comforted, she leans against him, closes her eyes, and slips into her blood-soaked nightmares.

**Sickness**

One of the things that Gai-sensei first mentions to them, as a team, is that they will always care for each other when they are hurt or sick.

Tenten, Neji, and Lee all nod solemnly in agreement, but they don't register the full meaning of his words until a few months later, when Neji doesn't show up for training, leaving Lee and Tenten to kick their heels alone in the clearing and wonder if his fangirls have finally mounted a successful attack and abduction.

Then Gai-sensei appears in a cloud of smoke, a very serious expression on his face, and informs them all that Neji is grievously ill, with that scourge of the lives of all genin – chicken pox.

Tenten and Lee, who have already had the dreaded infection, blanch at the thought of stoic Neji suffering the itchy, feverish agony.

"All right, you two," Gai-sensei says, looking at his remaining precious students. "Our mission for today is to slowly, gently nurse our beloved Neji back to full health. I have informed Hiashi-sama that we will be entering the compound around noon to begin the proceedings. We have approximately an hour and a half to ready ourselves. Lee, you will go and do some research regarding chicken pox, and also prepare for Neji a delectable, yet mild, lunch that will not upset his sensitive stomach. Tenten, you and I shall begin shopping for products that may cease the unpleasant itching sensation, burning, and feverishness that our poor teammate is suffering."

Lee salutes. "Yes, Gai-sensei!" He whips out his small notebook, and sprints off in the direction of the nearest grocery store, raising a formidable cloud of dust behind him.

Gai-sensei gives Tenten a thumbs-up. "Now, Tenten! What is the extent of your knowledge regarding ways to cease the suffering of chicken pox patients?"

Tenten tilts her head thoughtfully, trying to remember when she had the illness. It had been several years ago, and it's hardly clear in her memory. All that she really remembers is her mother smoothing some sort of mildly fragrant lotion over the painful red sores on her skin. "Eh…calamine lotion?"

Gai-sensei nods sagely. "That shall be our first item to pick up."

Tenten spends half an hour trailing after Gai-sensei as he heads to the library, checking out several medical volumes. Finally, they both end up at the grocery store, both of their noses buried in said books. "Ah, Gai-sensei, it says here that Neji would need to take baths with sodium bicarbonate or antihistamine medication to stop the itching," Tenten says, wrinkling her nose at the foreign medical names.

Their sensei strolls down the medical isle casually, plucking assorted tubes off the shelves. In response to Tenten's curious glance, he brandishes the fine print on said tubes. "In order to achieve the desired effect, we must empty the contents of these medications into warm water – ideally, a bathtub – before depositing Neji in said bathtub. We must take great care to clean his skin, before giving him this acetaminophen in order to reduce his fever."

It takes Tenten a few moments to process all the information. However, her brain gets stuck at one particular place in her sensei's instructions.

"We…have…to…give Neji a bath?" she croaks disbelievingly.

"Ideally, yes." Gai deposits a tube of calamine lotion into the shopping basket. "Now, Tenten. What scented bubble bath do you think Neji would be more likely to prefer? Lavender or strawberry?"

A wholly unnecessary image of Neji relaxing in a cloud of fragrant bubbles springs to mind, and Tenten almost faints. "L-lavender would be good, Gai-sensei."

"Excellent, excellent," Gai muses, checking his supply list. "Tenten, if you wouldn't mind picking up some sponges and perhaps a rubber duck or two, to ease ailing Neji's nerves, while I enter myself into the line?"

_Sponges? Rubber duck? _

The mental images hovering in Tenten's mind become more pronounced. Strongly resisting the temptation to ask her sensei what they plan to do involving Neji, _sponges _and a _rubber duck, _the kunoichi wanders, dazed, back into the isles. She has a feeling she wouldn't like the answer, anyway.

…Or maybe she would. Too much.

Tenten curses her hormones.

By noon, all of them assemble at the gates to the Hyuuga compound. Lee is there early, a bag of yet more books on chicken pox (and, Tenten dreads to note, the effects that chicken pox has on the _human mind_) slung over his shoulder, as he balances a tray of what appears to be steaming chicken soup.

Unfortunately, she is stuck holding the grocery store bags that contain the bubble bath, sponges, and rubber ducks, which makes her feel slightly ridiculous. Of course, _Gai-sensei _is the one who gets to prance about holding all the important medical solutions and tubes.

Upon one rap of the solid iron knocker, the gates swing open of their own accord. Gai-sensei leads the way inside the rather austere-looking compound, with his customary carefree grin and bouncy step, while Lee and Tenten follow in his wake, throwing apprehensive looks at each other.

Tenten gazes at the sprawling compound, eyes wide with amazement. She and Lee have never ventured this far into Neji's home, although she can only assume that Gai-sensei has been here before, what with his self-confident stride through the intricate pathways of the compound. She sees something that appears to be a manor, to their left, and the rest of the place seems to be comprised of numerous dojos, gardens, and outdoor practice areas. Tenten can only assume the main living areas are in another section of the compound.

"Eh, Gai-sensei?" inquires Lee at last. "Do you know where we may find Neji?"

Gai turns around promptly, a slightly abashed look on his face as he faces his trusting young students. "…No idea."

Tenten resists the urge to facefault.

Through some stroke of luck, and the kindliness of an old lady taking a walk – whom they later discover is Neji's infamous great-aunt – they all finally end up at the Hyuuga manor.

Neji's room is the highest one at the top of the tallest tower. Somehow, Tenten finds this oddly fitting, but she can't shake the thought of 'Princess Neji.'

Tenten has to admit that she feels a thrill of excitement at the thought of seeing Neji's room for the first time. However, when she, Lee, and Gai-sensei walk inside, she has to admit to feeling a little stunned.

First of all, it's dark. So dark that she has to squint to see the red spots adorning Neji's usually…immaculate…features. All the windows are shut, and the Hyuuga prodigy himself is lying on his bed, one arm thrown over his eyes in a rather melodramatic fashion. Suddenly, he gives a low moan, and turns on his side, away from them. "The light…it…it _burns…_"

Tenten closes the bedroom door with a sigh, seeing as Lee is too busy trying to stifle his giggles. "For heaven's sake, Neji, it's like you're on your deathbed."

Neji cracks an eye open to give his female teammate a baleful glare. "Do not mock my condition, Tenten."

"Never fear, Neji!" Gai-sensei booms, springing into the Good Guy Pose. "Lee, Tenten, and myself are here to nurse you back to health!"

Neji groans.

Tenten spends the next half hour beating Neji's pride into a box while she spoon-feeds him the chicken soup. Neji appears to be rather sulky at his teammates seeing him when he's not his best, and when he asks where Gai-sensei is and Tenten replies, offhandedly, "Probably fixing your bubble bath," the look on his face is just pure _gold. _

It takes the combined efforts of Lee and Tenten to haul him to the bathroom after he's done with the soup. Neji doesn't lower himself to kicking and screaming, however much he may want to, but Tenten can swear that he tries to dig his toes into the fabric of the carpet.

One of the most awkward moments in Team Gai history to date: Neji, Lee, and Tenten standing in Neji's bathroom, all of them with their arms crossed and looking everywhere but at each other, while Gai-sensei blithely tests the water temperature with his finger and wonders aloud whether he should have gotten the rose-scented calamine lotion for Neji.

Once Neji figures out that yes, the idiots really _do _intend to give him a bubble bath, he points at Tenten with the rubber duck, and states bluntly that he is not disrobing until she is _out _of there.

Which leaves Tenten to kick her heels in Neji's room while listening to the yelling, splashing, screamed insults, and ominous crashes that are now coming from the bathroom, all the while cursing her bad luck and lamenting the lost opportunity.

By the time they have exhausted everything on their "Steps To Nurse Neji Back To Health" list, darkness has fallen. Neji lies in his bed, wearing a fluffy purple bathrobe and about two inches of calamine lotion slathered on every visible inch of skin. Gai-sensei has fallen asleep in Neji's rocking chair, Lee is sitting cross-legged in front of Neji's closet, looking quite disturbed and holding the rubber duck for security, and Tenten is sprawled right in the middle of the floor, having decided that she'd rather cut all her hair off than ever spoon-feed _anyone _ever again.

All in all, this goes down as one of the most taxing (and emotionally scarring, as far as Lee and Neji are concerned) missions in Team Gai history. Another one for the record books.

Then, calamine-coated and fluffy-bathrobe wearing Neji actually _smiles _and thanks them both, and Lee punches the air with triumph and Tenten grins, and for once, it's all good.

**Melody**

Unfortunately for them all, Gai-sensei and Lee think that they can sing.

Neji and Tenten, to their dismay, discover this on the way back from a successful mission. Lee and their sensei are so hyped up that Lee comes up with the _brilliant _idea to compose a song about their victory, and of course, Gai-sensei eggs him on.

"Ne_ji_, like poison _ivy, _so soft and _pretty, _but really…_prickly_ if you're an _enemy_—"

Neji has remained silent through the previous three verses. Now, however, he cracks, and using an extra burst of chakra, springs forward onto Lee's branch. "Who are you calling _soft _and _pretty_, spandex boy?"

Tenten winces at the ensuing crashes, but despite the awful singing, has the courtesy to stop and help scrape the groaning and twitching Lee off the tree branch.

After they make their way back home, Tenten resolves to teach her male teammates the finer points of good music.

It is a noble ideal, but one that she is forced to give up after the first ten or so fruitless attempts. Neji insists on falling asleep through her carefully prepared selection of orchestral scores, and Lee's attempts to improvise ballads to sing along with the music to are just as bad.

So it becomes a regular occurrence to find them all in Tenten's apartment, with the record player on. Neji sits cross-legged across from the coffee table, nodding off, an oddly peaceful expression on his face. Lee balances precariously on the edge of her armchair (it helps his creative juices flow) warbling happily.

Tenten reclines on the sofa, ruefully smiling at the sight. This is a particularly peaceful arrangement, comprised of slow, graceful legato strokes on the violin and cello. The two instruments make a wonderful duet together.

Neji's soft snoring serves as a steady, regular metronome to the four/four beat – as well as Lee's ballad about the glorious springtime of youth.

Odd as it seems, it's a melody that she wouldn't trade for the world.

**Star**

Tenten loves astrology. It's a hobby she's had for years, and one that she's slowly, gradually trying to introduce to her teammates.

They take small steps, though. When she had first told them about it, Neji had scoffed that it was a chancy way to interpret fate at best, while Lee seemed vaguely intrigued. They both grudgingly accepted her invitation to stargaze with her, though, which, in Tenten's eyes, is a perfect activity for a person just beginning to foray into the world of astrology.

Which is how they all end up in the meadow outside of the forest, lying in a circle, gazing at the expense of stars. For Tenten, who has memorized an extensive list of constellations, as well as the twelve that make up the zodiac, the stars practically form words of silver against the black expanse of the sky.

…Neji and Lee, however, are not so enlightened. Tonight is perfect for the viewing of Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius, in particular – the Fire signs. The Lion is in the Archer's sights, as Aries hovers in the background, she explains, tracing the star-lit figures. She smiles, the celestial figures reflected in her eyes. "Sagittarius has plans for a Leo…" she murmurs, almost to herself. "Do you two see anything?"

Neji appears to be scanning the skies with his Byakugan. "…I see a pig!" he exclaims at last.

Tenten blinks, and slides a little closer, so that their heads are almost touching. "How do you see a _pig_?"

Neji points proudly.

"…Neji, that's Canis Minor."

"…Well, it looks like a pig."

The astrologist inside of Tenten dies a little.

"Tenten?" Lee asks, after a little while. "Is that Ursa Major, the Great Bear?"

Before Tenten can get close enough to see what he's talking about, Neji snorts. "It looks more like Gai-sensei eating a potato."

Tenten and Lee exchange puzzled looks. "Eh, Neji, that's definitely the Great Bear," Tenten ventures at last. "See his claws? And the mouth, right there?"

Neji considers the constellation deeply, before coming to a conclusion. "You two show a remarkably uninspiring lack of creativity while viewing the stars."

Tenten squeaks with indignation. "Neji!"

"You said the Archer has its sights on the Lion? Well, to me, it looks like Hiashi-sama chasing that Inuzuka kid out of the compound."

The weapons mistress regards the stars for a few minutes, and is completely unable to see the connection. "Well, Neji," she says with a grin. "It looks like you just have a unique perspective when it comes to stargazing."

Neji mutters something along the lines of, _Damn right I do. _

Lee proves himself to be a little more of a promising astrologer. He picks out constellations with relative ease, Tenten taking the opportunity to glance at the positioning of the rest of the planets in relation to Mars. Neji's mutterings regarding the stars to figures from daily life, however, can't help but distract the both of them, and Lee and Tenten find themselves giggling several times at the vivid descriptions Neji paints, given no more ammunition then a limited view of the celestial body.

Even Tenten is lured away from her more serious practices, eventually. "Look," she says, during a lull in the conversation, pointing at three stars, off in the distance. They are all unusually bright – they may actually be planets, come to think of it. "That's us."

Neji blinks. "We're so…isolated."

Lee disagrees. "We're next to each other, aren't we?"

Tenten grins. "And we're some of the brightest out there."

The three genin exchange smiles, and Tenten has to admit that there may be some benefits to non-astrological stargazing, after all.

¤

Reviews appreciated!


	7. seven

**Note:** Thank you to everybody who reviewed. :)

¤

**Home**

Tenten discovers her strong affinity for the Village Hidden in the Mist during an infiltration mission shortly after she makes jounin. She volunteers for the mission immediately after learning about _where _exactly they have to infiltrate, deciding that she can deal with the details later.

Her mother told her about her past life as a kunoichi of the Mist, when she was much younger, thinking that her daughter would want to know the truth of her past - namely, her lack of a last name. Tenten had shrugged it off with a bright, sunny smile, claiming that _this _was her home now, and nothing could change that.

As she grows older, though, she admits to feeling some curiosity about her mother's homeland. The small apartment they had shared was decorated with portraits of the Mist that Sayaka bought, as soon as she had enough money saved up from missions to do so. When Tenten asks about them, Sayaka smiles wistfully and says that sometimes, it's nice to be reminded of home.

Tenten's first impression upon entering Mist is that the portraits didn't do it justice. She is familiar with its bloody, brutal history, and it seems so incongruous, when she sees the beauty of the land.

Genma, a Konoha shinobi born and bred, shudders at the constant drizzle. He claims it depresses him, and takes refuge inside the tent more often than not. Tenten, on the other hand, is more than a little fascinated by the unfamiliarity of this new land. She sits in the branches of the formidable pine trees that comprise the forests of the Mist, tilting her face up to the faint, unceasing rain. It doesn't rain in torrents here, like in Konoha, but instead falls in slow, gentle curtains of blue that cloak the landscape with a mysterious translucency.

From her vantage point, she can see the land below her, which seems to be comprised of several misty layers of blue. The clouds hover nearer to the ground here, and on the rare occasions when the sun peeks out from behind them, it has the curious effect of cloaking the entire village in a sheer golden veil. Most times, it's still drizzling while the sun is out. Within a matter of minutes, rainbows form in the sky, arcing from here into eternity.

There are more lakes here than Tenten's ever seen in her life. Sometimes, at night, she forsakes the precious sleep she needs for the long day of information gathering that lies ahead, in order to slip out of the tent, and sit at the side of whatever lake they happen to be camping beside. Even though the nights are cloaked in mist, it does little to block out the silvery light of the moon, and the image is reflected in the black, seemingly bottomless, depths of the lakes.

Tenten admits to feeling more than a little depressed when their month-long mission comes to an end. She has never been here before, and has no memories of it. But there is something about this mysterious land of mist that just seems to tug at the depths of her very soul.

It is a little hard for her to transition from the eerily quiet, misty forests of the Land of Water to the usual bright, sunny, green forests in the Fire Country, familiar though these forests may be.

Tenten scolds herself for it. A shinobi's one and only loyalty is to their own hidden village, the symbol of which is emblazoned on the forehead protector she so proudly wears. She has no _right _to miss the Village Hidden in the Mist, and promptly immerses herself in the familiarity of her beloved home village.

In a short span of time, she gets used to the long, hot, sunny days again. Sitting in the sun-warmed meadows while waiting for Lee and Neji to show up for training. The familiarity of her comrades' voices echoing through the streets of Konoha.

Tenten wouldn't trade her home here for the world, but sometimes, after a long day at work, she sits on the windowsill of her apartment, the window thrown open and her feet dangling carelessly into open space. A rare cool breeze blows from the east, and she turns toward it, feeling its gentle caress of the loose locks of her hair, while she remembers a land far away from here, where it's always raining and that breeze is ever-present.

**Confusion**

One fine spring day, when Team Gai is training arduously in preparation for their next try at the chuunin exams, Lee comes up with the brilliant idea that they _all _work with their weapons techniques, instead of just Tenten.

The weapons mistress feels quite gratified. Moment of folly number one: she has no idea she should be feeling very, very worried instead.

Tenten has just mastered nunchaku, and she decides that she will work with the ball and chain that day, because she only has her old practice wooden pair of nunchaku with her anyway. So she tosses the wooden nunchaku to Lee, who cheers with excitement and begins his execution of the elementary pattern dance that Gai-sensei had begun to teach him, while Neji busies himself attempting to increase his senbon precision.

Through some sick, insane twist in fate, Lee and the wooden nunchaku end up a little too close to Tenten and the ball and chain for comfort. And the two poor genin are once again dealt a negative fate card.

In a momentary loss of control, the other end of Tenten's chain wraps itself around Lee's left ankle, dragging the spandex-clad boy to the floor, head-first, with a loud thud. As a direct result of this action, the wooden nunchaku leave Lee's grasp, and go flying through the air…

…Where they deal the unwary kunoichi a solid blow to the head. Tenten is down within a second, peacefully unconscious.

Leaving the very stunned Neji to stand in the midst of the clearing, staring down at his two unconscious teammates, wondering what the _hell _just happened there.

Hyuuga Neji's most taxing endurance training to date: Carrying his two unconscious teammates, one over each shoulder, across the village to the hospital.

Luckily, he runs into Haruno Sakura during his first stagger into the hospital. Taking one look at the rather demented-looking white-eyed boy, the drooling Lee, and the remarkable bump on Tenten's head, the pink-haired apprentice grabs the front of Neji's shirt and buzzes him right through the information desk, and into the nearest available room.

Within a few minutes, Lee and Tenten are tucked into neighboring hospital beds, and Sakura has fairly forced Neji into a seat while quizzing him about the methods of injury. Neji tells the sordid tale in his usual monotone, and to her credit, Sakura keeps a straight face through all of it and refrains from letting her "_Team Gai is definitely insane," _expression show.

"Alright, Neji-san," she says at last, once she is finished probing Lee and Tenten's heads with her chakra. "They should awaken soon, with no real side effects save for a relatively short-lived headache, as well as mild and temporary mental confusion." Upon seeing the drastic expression change on the Hyuuga prodigy's face, she offers a sweet smile. "Nothing long-lasting, I assure you. If anything seems to be too out of sorts, just buzz me."

With that, she waltzes out of the door, leaving Neji to glare sourly after her. While he waits for his teammates to awaken, possibly in a dubious mental state…

Neji sighs. Sometimes he _swears _that life is out to get him.

It is another fifteen minutes before Tenten regains consciousness. She cracks first one eye open, then the other, in the hopes that will lessen her splitting headache. She is disappointed.

She is in a completely unfamiliar, white room, one that seems to swim before her gaze. Tenten giggles.

Then, lo and behold, a _person _appears in her field of vision. A funny person, with swimmy brown hair and swimmy white eyes. "Tenten?" the person says, very cautiously.

Tenten giggles more.

From what she can see now, the person looks highly unsettled. "Tenten, it's me, Neji."

_Neji. _The name is vaguely familiar. After about a minute of deep thought, it clicks. Brown hair, swimmy white eyes. Neji. Of course. And yet, something is very, very wrong…

"Where's Lee?" Tenten demands abruptly.

Neji blinks. "Lee?"

"Spandex. Green. Loud." These are only a few of the simplest adjectives that spring to mind…for some reason, she can't seem to puzzle out the others. A little voice in her mind is telling her that they don't make sense.

"Ah, he still hasn't regained consciousness." Neji nods toward the bed next to her. What he isn't prepared for, however, is for Tenten to almost _roll _out of her bed upon hearing this. He catches hold of her shoulder quickly, saving her from toppling flat on her face. "Tenten?"

To his eternal shock, Tenten reaches out an arm toward Lee, a look of eloquent hopelessness and despair in her brown eyes. "Oh, Lee," she murmurs, before falling face-down on her pillow. "The love of my life…why does he continue to elude me so…?"

At this point, Neji begins to wonder if it's really _him _who suffered the head trauma. He gives himself an experimental jolt of chakra.

…Nothing. Neji is beginning to feel very, very afraid.

Tenten is still gazing at the blissfully unaware Lee with a look of nothing less than absolute adoration. "Lee?" she murmurs again.

Miraculously, the Green Beast of Konoha stirs, before sitting up in bed, apparently not any worse for wear. "Ah, Neji, my youthful teammate! Where is our beloved weapons mistress?" In response to Neji's wordless gesture, Lee glances to his side, at his team's kunoichi.

"Tenten!" he exclaims. "You shouldn't be walking just yet-"

Before he can say anything more, Tenten gives a slightly drunk wobble and collapses on Lee's hospital bed, her arms linked around his neck. She gives him a shy smile. "Hi."

Lee's face is rapidly turning several different shades of red. "N-Neji…what's going on?"

"Mild and temporary mental confusion," Neji says dryly. "I think you're the love of her life."

Lee almost passes out again upon hearing this statement.

Tenten blushes at the cute look of utter confusion on his face.

Neji merely sighs. "As amusing as this state of events promises to be…I think we should probably find Tsunade-sama and ask her to attend to Tenten."

Lee nods agreement, a little bit tongue-tied due to the fact that Tenten is now nuzzling his cheek.

Neji flees the room before his mental scarring is completed further.

After a few minutes that are absolutely heavenly for Tenten (Lee is _patting her head _and asking her how she feels!), and kind of a completely unique experience for Lee - he has no experience in dealing with befuddled girls - Neji enters the room again, attended by Tsunade-sama.

Neji and Lee get the impression that the Godaime thinks their little problem is very amusing, judging by the good-natured smirk on her face. Tenten sits still obligingly as her idol gently inspects the considerable bump on her head. "Well," Tsunade-sama says at last, shaking her head in amazement. "Your teammate seems to be having a unique reaction to her injury. The bump has swelled up quite a bit since Sakura inspected it, and accordingly, Tenten's mental confusion might last a little bit longer than expected."

"But she'll be fine?" Lee inquires anxiously.

Tsunade smiles at the two boys. "Perfectly. You just have to deal with her whims for the next day or so, until her mind regains its usual equilibrium. Bring her back to the hospital if this last more than two days." And with that, the Hokage is gone, leaving Neji, Lee, and Tenten to blink at each other.

"Ah…" Neji swallows. "Should we go back and train?"

Tenten nods enthusiastically. "Lee?"

"Yes, Tenten?"

The weapons mistress blushes faintly. "Can we hold hands for a bit?"

Lee falls back down into bed again, the shock having proved too much for him. Tenten gazes at him, slightly confused and wondering what she had done wrong.

Neji merely covers his eyes with one and hand and sighs. _It is going to be two very, very long days._

--

Luckily for them all, Tenten's confusion wears off after one and a half days, when she dozes off while they are all relaxing in the meadow after training, and has a near heart attack upon waking up to find herself hand-in-hand with Lee.

Neji explains the events of the past one and a half days to her, and after Tenten is finished banging her head against the nearest tree, she gives her now very afraid-looking teammates baleful glares. "This incident shall never be mentioned again."

Neji and Lee frantically nod their assent.

That night, when Tenten gets home, she burns her wooden nunchaku, and spends the hour after that throwing kunai, denying that it felt nice to hold Lee's hand, with each one that lands solidly in the center of the target.

**Fear **

Arguably one of Tenten's most irrational fears: the dark.

At the age of fifteen, and ranked as a chuunin, it is something that she should have outgrown a _long _time ago. And it's quite ridiculous by anybody's standards that an accomplished kunoichi, who can already kill twelve men in twelve seconds, should be afraid of something so very…mundane.

Tenten lives in fear that someday, Neji or Lee will discover her little secret. True, she's done an admirable job of avoiding the darkness for the past two years that they have been teammates. But still…

One day, that very fear comes to pass. They are assigned to stand guard over a certain manor on the outskirts of the Fire Country, until the wedding day of a certain lord who resides in the aforementioned manor. Tsunade-sama had impressed on all of Team Gai how much of an important mission this was, even though it wasn't the usual type of thing they were assigned to.

Tenten understands this. After all, they can't _always _be taking field missions and slaying the enemy. What she _doesn't _understand is why they all have to stay in a little wooden _shack _in the woods, with next to nothing in the way of modern amenities. Including electricity.

Which means that, after seven in the evening, darkness falls. A deep, penetrating darkness. Neji, Tenten, and Lee sit in their miserable shack, while Gai-sensei takes the night guard, and Tenten can't help but listen to the eerie sounds that only the woods at night can produce.

Needless to say, it becomes near impossible for her to get any sleep during that mission. The combination of utter, stifling darkness, and mysterious sounds and shadows and lurking _things _outside the cabin guarantee that.

Tenten thinks that it can't get any worse.

Then, there is the thunderstorm.

Neji is unbothered by the vicious bolts of lightning and the loud claps of thunder alike, and although Lee jumps every time a particularly bright flash of lightning illuminates their dark cabin, his reactions cannot even compare to the terrible twitchiness of Tenten's thorough terror.

After things escalate to an unbearable level, she abandons her pretense at meditating with the rest of her team, and crawls to her little cot and throws the thin blanket over her head, where she proceeds to begin shaking like a skittish stallion.

Neji cracks an eye open. "Tenten?"

"Are you alright?" Lee inquires.

Tenten draws the blanket a little bit tighter. "Ah, I'm just fine," she says, hating the way her voice trembles. "Just tired, that's all."

In another hour, Tenten is eating her words. Neji and Lee are in their individual cots, soundly asleep. _Her _cot is near the window, and she hates to admit it, but the insane flashes of lightning and thunder are almost as terrifying as the blackness that coats the shack between flashes.

By midnight, her nerves are worn completely thin, and she thinks she might be going insane. So, abandoning her pride, Tenten stands up shakily, wrapping the blanket around her. Maybe she'll go sit next to Lee for a little bit. Just to calm herself down, and convince herself that she's not alone in this awful, dark little space.

The weapons mistress resolves to be very, very quiet. No need to wake up her teammates and then face some awkward questions about why she's wandering around the shack in the dead of night, during a raging storm.

Halfway across the floor, a ragged voice whispers, "Tenten?"

Tenten spins around, and finds herself confronted by a pair of ethereal-looking white eyes, just as the lightning flashes again, silhouetting the figure in darkness.

Without further ado, she screams and jumps as far away from the creepiness as humanly possible.

…Which ends up being into the cot of one now very, very awake Rock Lee. "Tenten?" he asks groggily, undoubtedly confused as to why his female teammate seems to have him in a cross between a formidable death grip and a hug.

"…Hello, Lee."

"…I had no idea I looked _this _bad after a couple hours of sleep," Neji says grumpily, padding back to his cot. "Serves me right for wanting to check on the mental health of my teammate."

Needless to say, Tenten has to explain herself. Neji and Lee do not laugh. Instead, they stay awake together until the storm is over - Lee and Tenten together on the cot, while Neji self-consciously attempts to finger-comb his hair, talking about the most random fears they have all experienced.

They do this until a few hours before dawn, until Neji falls asleep again, ruining his intense hair care efforts of the past hour and a half. The storm has stopped and it's not as dark anymore, but Lee doesn't ask Tenten for full possession of his cot again. Instead, he simply lies down on the rock-hard pillow, and is snoring softly within a few minutes. Tenten nestles her head into his shoulder, and slips into the most peaceful sleep she's had in a long time.

**Lightning/Thunder**

Ever since this one incident, Tenten overcomes her fear of the dark.

But still, whenever there's lightning and thunder and darkness, she ends up curled beside Lee, and Neji ends up forsaking his beauty sleep, as they all sit together and talk until the rain stops, the clouds part, and the sun rises again.

**Bonds**

When Team Gai first becomes Team Gai, none of them believe that they will ever become best friends.

This notion is shattered several times over. The first time, when they nurse Neji back to health after his experience with chicken pox. The second time, when they each end up saving each others' lives during a mission. The third time, when Tenten sprains her ankle during a mission, and Lee and Neji link both of her arms over each of their shoulders, and carry her all the way home. The first time Tenten unleashes her temper regarding Neji and Lee's constant fights, the two boys look at each other, mutual disdain forgotten, and shudder at the kunoichi's wrath.

When Lee almost breaks his hand in his continuous attempts to increase his taijutsu skill by punching trees, Neji is the one who holds the hand still and bandages it, while Tenten bathes it in ice to numb the pain.

Whenever Neji's angst threatens to overwhelm, Lee and Tenten drag him out to the ice cream place and bully him into buying a triple-scoop watermelon swirl waffle cone, while assuring him that no, he _doesn't _look like an idiot, carrying around an ice cream cone that's about twice the size of his head.

All of Tenten's most important, significant, amusing, touching, and…well, all of the memories that she holds dear, she has Neji and Lee at her side.

She loves them more than she will ever admit.

¤

Reviews appreciated!


	8. eight

**Note: **Thank you to everybody who reviewed, and here are five more drabbles in the lovely life of Tenten.

**¤**

**Market**

There are very, very few things Tenten loves more in life than shopping for new weapons.

Admittedly, it is something she doesn't do often. Her initial kunai and shuriken sets - sets that she still has - had been her mother's first, which had been passed down to her upon her entrance to the Academy. Gai-sensei had given Tenten her first pair of nunchaku, which are battered with age, weighted with lead, more lethal than almost any other weapon in her arsenal, and one of the ones she treasures most.

Her ball and chain, bo, and tri-sectional staff had been given similarly. At first, Tenten had been reluctant to accept so many of her sensei's weapons; it made her feel a little self-conscious about not exactly having money to buy her own. Gai-sensei had youthfully stamped out that sentiment, though, enthusiastically declaring that he was a taijutsu specialist first and foremost, and that he no longer had any use for these weapons, so they would be better suited for a weapons mistress like herself.

The men in her life have always known the easiest route to her heart. For her birthday, Neji always gifts her with practical weapons, to be used in summoning scrolls. Gai-sensei usually whips out another rare weapon from his personal arsenal and presents it to her with a huge grin, while Lee has the tendency to give her kunai and senbon painted an assortment of "youthful" colors.

(Her ANBU recruitment squad snickers the first time she pulls out her collection of deadly pink kunai in combat. Just for that, Tenten spares no mercy.)

Kankurou stuns her on their six-month anniversary by giving her a very elaborately crafted tessen. He explains, a blush staining his paint-less face, that it had belonged to his great-grandmother, who had been a legendary kunoichi of the Sand. It looks like every other harmless folding fan, with its stunning violet color and the golden dragon painted on it, but with a single, practiced flick of her wrist, it is transformed into an elegant bringer of death.

Tenten hugs him very hard and declares that he is one of the most amazing people she knows.

(Even years after their amicable and mutual breakup, the tessen is still one of Tenten's most prized possessions. When she isn't using it, she keeps it proudly displayed and spread near the entrance to her apartment.)

Tenten always knew that Genma wasn't the most…_predictable_…of people, and yet, when he presents her with a pair of finely designed sais as part of her wedding present; her jaw still drops at the sheer magnificence of the slender yet deadly three-pronged weapons. Solid silver all the way through, whittled through to a treacherously sharp point. The hilts are slender, with ornamental gold paint snaking all the way through them. At the points where hilt meets blade, two rubies are studded. They remind Tenten of dragons' eyes.

Between anniversaries, birthdays, and annual seasonal holidays, Tenten receives all the weapons she _needs, _from the people she loves.

The first time she has to go to the weapons' market in about ten years is because she requires a katana for her formal induction into ANBU.

Tenten goes to the blacksmith that traditionally makes ANBU weapons. She inhales the scent of fire, metal, and leather, until it clouds her senses, and then smiles at the sheer, wonderful familiarity of it.

It takes her a long time to detail exactly to the blacksmith what she expects of this weapon. She describes the kind of steel that she wants in the blade, how sharp she wants the point to be, how heavy the hilt is in proportion to the blade - in short, her dream weapon. The one that she will forge her future with.

It is a month before the katana is completed. Tenten is presented with it, along with her mask, at the formal induction. She is the ANBU Falcon now, but it is the katana that has her full attention.

The moment she draws the blade from the sheath that the Captain had arranged around her shoulders, Tenten marvels at how remarkable it is; everything about it. This weapon, she knows, is truly one of a kind, down to the twin dragons embroidered in red silk onto the hilt. Designed with her in mind.

The joy it brings her is without compare.

It took twenty-five years for her to achieve this. A lifetime of dedication; a way of life.

When Tenten feels the weight of her katana across her back, she feels truly fulfilled.

**Technology**

When Tenten was young, she tended to get bored very easily. Like most five-year-olds, she tended to be rather fidgety during long classes that didn't involve fun things like actual weapons practice.

Unlike most five-year-olds, she had a tendency to craft elaborate paper kunai and shuriken, and then throw said paper weapons around the room when her sensei's back was turned. All the while sporting a completely innocent smile.

Skills evolve with age, and by the age of fifteen, when Tenten is bored, she throws hundreds of bulls-eyes with various weapons, executes stunningly perfect patterns with bo, nunchaku, and tri-sectional staff, before optionally laying waste to the rotting trees of Konoha's forests with her ball and chain.

The years of making paper weapons have taken their toll on her, though. In addition to being Konoha's foremost weapons expert, she is also one of Konoha's most notable origami experts.

Tenten's apartment is decorated with colored paper animals of all sorts. Lee jokes that she has her own personal menagerie in the confines of her living room, although she specializes in swans and paper flowers.

For every birthday that Neji, Lee, or Gai-sensei go through, Tenten makes them an animal or flower of their choice to give to them along with her gift. Gai-sensei favors turtles; every year on the last day of December, she goes to her favorite origami shop and purchases the best kind of marbled green (or orange, or neon blue…) paper she can find. In less than half an hour, she has a perfect folded turtle, complete with carefully penciled smiley eyes and a big grin on the small turtle face.

Gai crows with glee every time he receives one. And brags about them at every jounin get-together he goes to.

Lee gets the first paper tiger that Tenten makes. It isn't out of deliberate intention; more accurately, Lee finds Tenten sitting among a small sea of orange tigers that have been declared less-than-perfect, banging her head against the edge of the table in frustration.

"They're _ugly,_" she wails, shaking one specimen in front of Lee. "Look at it! It has a _clubfoot, _for goodness sake! It's the third one in a row!"

Lee gently takes the disabled tiger from his distressed teammate. "It is a noble and beautiful animal, Tenten!" He clasps the tiger to his chest, his eyes taking on a dreamy expression. "It is an inspiration! I will treasure it for as long as I live!"

Even after Tenten finally masters the art of making the perfect tiger, the first, imperfect, one is still Lee's favorite, proudly displayed on his dresser.

As a result of one twisted inside joke, Neji is the one with the extraordinary good fortune to receive hot pink paper cranes from Tenten every year. The color pains him and makes him feel more like a little _girl _than a very capable and very…not-little-girl-ish…shinobi.

Nevertheless, Neji strings each crane up whenever he receives them, so that his otherwise bare and austerely white room is adorned with a sea of pink paper cranes dangling about an inch away from his head.

The rest of the Hyuuga clan privately doubts his sanity. Neji likes lying in bed in the mornings and looking at the cranes drift around with the breeze.

Once, Tenten aspires to spread the joy of origami to Neji and Lee. The two of them end up sporting marvelous paper cuts, lying around on the sofa, moaning about their bad fortune, and how their pride will never be the same.

Tenten merely grins and tells them that they can think of this as her new kind of weapon.

**Gift**

Tenten's class graduates from the Academy on the first day of December. When she meets her teammates in a random clearing the day after, the sky is an ominous shade of gray, and it threatens rain.

By the time she and the two other genin she is paired with exchange slightly nervous glances and cautious 'hello's (the white-eyed boy simply grunts a very monosyllabic greeting, though, and Tenten frowns at him), the drizzle begins.

Tenten, Rock Lee, and Hyuuga Neji are left to sit together under an old oak tree, in silence, as the rain continues to pour around them.

At this point, Tenten thinks that it cannot get any worse.

Then, there is a sudden puff of smoke, and a green-spandex clad man appears in front of them, flashing an inappropriately gleeful grin and thumbs up, complete with impossibly bright, white teeth. In order to add to this charming picture, he appears to be standing astride a giant orange _turtle. _

At this point, Tenten realizes that she was very, very wrong. Things _had _just gotten worse. She despairs. An inauspicious beginning for their team by all accounts.

Thankfully, it doesn't take long for this notion to get shattered. Within two weeks, Tenten quickly learns all there is to know about her team. Gai-sensei is…quirky, but a strong and respectable shinobi, which is plain to see, even past the hideous outfit. Lee isn't exactly the most talented or _normal_ of boys, but she supposes that he has a good heart. And Neji? Well, Neji is a genius, enough said. The emotional problems and maudlin view about fate must come with the title.

Tenten figures that she can live with these oddballs. They are lovable oddballs, after all, and things could have been much worse.

They spend Christmas together, at the insistence of Gai-sensei. When he invites all of them over to his house for dinner, Tenten accepts immediately. It'd just be another lonely holiday, otherwise, and, well, with _her _teammates and sensei, it is bound to be interesting.

Due to previous experience with her sensei's choice of favored colors and animals, Tenten is not surprised when she steps into Gai's blindingly green home. He has gone to the trouble of decorating red paper chains to string about the rooms - one which Neji appears to have gotten stuck in, apparently. The neon turtle-sitting-on-icicle lights do make her blink, though, but she smiles and tells Gai-sensei that the décor is lovely.

Lee and Gai-sensei have been working on dinner for the past few hours, and when Lee, wearing an outrageously orange apron and giant chef's cap, leaps out from the kitchen and proudly declares that dinner is ready to be consumed, Tenten can't help but giggle, even as she helps disentangle a very grumpy Neji from the red paper chain.

Halfway through dinner, Tenten realizes that this is probably the most unconventional Christmas she has ever had the pleasure of experiencing. Instead of sitting around a table (Gai-sensei explains, scratching his head sheepishly, that he had accidentally shattered it while practicing a few taijutsu techniques the previous night), they all curl on up on individual squishy couches and beanbags of all sorts on the living room, munching on Lee's admittedly delicious dinner, while loudly arguing the merits of weapon arts versus conventional taijutsu.

Sometime after they all finish eating, Neji discovers a bottle of eggnog in the refrigerator. Being a very sheltered young Hyuuga, he has no idea what it is, and ends up chugging the majority of the bottle before the effects kick in.

Lee, Tenten, and Gai-sensei can only stare when Neji staggers back into the living room, flushed, giggling, and loudly declaring the joys of the season.

The rest of the night passes by in a pleasurable enough fashion, spent trying to sober Neji, convincing Gai-sensei that he should _not_ grow a beard under _any_ circumstances, and opening presents.

It is a little past midnight when Tenten has finally worn herself out by dancing with Lee and a still slightly tipsy Neji. She collapses in Gai-sensei's favorite beanbag, takes one look at Neji and Lee dancing and Gai-sensei's furtive attempts to sneak out his camera, and smiles, looking up at the green, green ceiling.

It is the first time that she admits to herself that maybe, just _maybe, _this new team might just be the best gift she's ever been given.

**Smile**

One of the first things that Tenten notices about Neji is that the boy simply _does not smile._ At first, she chalks it up to shyness, but after they have spent two weeks together and he still has yet to exhibit even the simplest curving up of the lips, she finds herself worrying about his mental health.

Maybe it's just because she is a naturally happy person, or maybe she just has a twisted fascination with people who can find it within themselves to be _un_happy when they obviously have so much to be happy for. Whatever the reason, Tenten ends up plotting, with none other than Konoha's newest Green Beast In Training, a dastardly scheme that, by its denouement, will end with Neji smiling.

It takes one mission, a dusty road, a lovely sunset, Lee trying on yellow spandex for size, and a swarm of baby kittens for their dastardly scheme to succeed as planned. A bit more troublesome than their original outline, yes, but as Team Gai sits at the side of the road as the sun sets, the dusky scent of winter jasmine lingering in the air, while the still yellow-clad Lee hums a cheerful but off-key tune, and the kittens meow and climb all over a positively _grinning _Neji, Tenten sighs and leans back against a tree, and thinks that it had all been rather worth it.

In this tradition, it is one of the least-quoted, but most solemn, duties of their team - to cheer up fellow members when that ever-present angst threatens to overwhelm. They discover quickly that Neji has a weakness for kittens, puppies, baby animals in general, and large ice cream cones. Lee loves picnics on top of grassy hills in order to unwind, followed by splashing around in nearby ponds and trying to ambush ducks underwater.

Unfortunately, Lee and Neji tend to be rather clueless on the rare occasions when Tenten is actually feeling under the weather.

Usually Neji is at a complete loss, and offers complete access to his clan's armory for the day. When this fails, he tries to make her a nice, calming cup of jasmine tea, or buys her a grape Popsicle from the ice cream man.

Lee composes youthful poetry, sings, and brings her baby ducklings from the pond to cheer her up, as well as random assorted flowers.

Usually, Tenten has no clue what to do with these things. She has worked her way through the Hyuuga armory twice, Neji's jasmine tea is frankly the most disgusting substance on the face of this earth, and grape really isn't her flavor. She supposes Lee's poetry and singing are quite nice, but all the "flower" metaphors tend to make her think perverted thoughts, and she doesn't really know how to explain away the vivid blush on her face as her spandex-clad teammate serenades her, sporting a completely innocent expression. And the ducklings? Well, the ducklings are ferocious little _demons. _Enough said.

Despite this, at the end of even the most depressing day, as Tenten sits with her teammates at her side, nursing a cup of jasmine tea, a half-eaten grape Popsicle, several pages of poetry that she supposes she could sell to Jiraiya-sama as creatively created erotica, and several red marks on her hands, courtesy ducklings, she can't help but smile.

**Innocence**

Shinobi lose a little of their innocence every day.

Tenten loses the first of it when she almost dies on her first mission. She will never again make the mistake of thinking that she, or anybody else, is invincible, and, foolish as it was, she misses that notion dearly.

A little more, when she holds her teammate's arm together on the field, praying that he won't die, as the result of a sick twist of fate.

She is completely, utterly shocked when she learns of the Sand's treachery. Sure, she believed that the shinobi of the Sand were vicious, cruel opponents, but…traitors? Her mind refuses to wrap around the idea of a peace treaty, so heedlessly shattered, until she sees the Sandaime's dead body.

That is the first time she learns that not every shinobi honors their word as closely as she and her compatriots do.

Both of her teammates almost die during their attempt to return Uchiha Sasuke back to Konoha. She remembers the cute black-haired boy from the chuunin exams. _Traitor._

It slips away from her a little more every day, every time she almost loses somebody that she holds dear, every time she sees her hands slippery with the blood of the enemy, every time she leaves Konoha on a mission and wonders if this is the last time she will ever see her beloved home.

Every time she celebrates a birthday, she wonders offhandedly if she will live to see the next one.

Tenten writes her first will and testament at the age of fifteen.

This is a strange path she has chosen. Where she lives from day to day, simply glad to be alive, and her view of the world as she knew it was irrevocably shattered into a million pieces by the age of thirteen.

As an ANBU assassin, Tenten is the best of the best. She, like the rest of her comrades, like her grimly senbon-chewing husband, has a roughly fifty percent chance of surviving every mission she is sent on. Living from mission to mission, returning home to Lee and Neji, to the rest of her friends, to Genma, to hold them close and savor the precious little time she has left - this is her life. Attempting to cook a decent dinner with Genma one night; crouched on a branch with a kunai trained on an S-rank criminal the next. Living on the edge by all accounts.

Tenten wouldn't trade it for the world.

¤

Reviews appreciated!


	9. nine

**Note: **Thank you very much to all who reviewed. :) Five Ten-drabbles follow, including fun, and some interesting (but not in a bad way!) pairings.

¤

**Completion**

Even after gaining entry into ANBU at the age of twenty-five, young by all accounts, Tenten still feels like she has a long way to go.

It has been thirteen years since she graduated from the Academy; ten since she made chuunin and truly earned the right to call herself Konoha's weapons mistress, and five years since the jounin selection exam. She has come a long way from the little _kid _she had been more than a decade ago, and, accordingly, she is proud of that. Hell, in the meantime, she's even managed to get _married. _Something that she hadn't even begun to dream of, before the past one and a half years.

"When I look at things in terms of time and accomplishments," Tenten muses to Genma one night, as she unwinds her hair and begins to brush it out, "I've done a lot. But…"

"But?" Genma prompts, in the midst of polishing his katana.

Tenten turns around to face him, a rueful look on her face. "But I don't feel…_fulfilled_ yet. You know what I mean?"

He holds out his arms, and she joins him on the bed, tucking her head comfortably against his chin. "Well, I remember the feeling, I suppose," he says.

Tenten looks up at him. "So, do you feel that you've completely accomplished your goals in life?"

Genma rotates the ever-present senbon thoughtfully. "Jounin, ANBU assassin and tracker, brief but successful stint as sensei to my own genin team, loyal shinobi to Konoha and our Godaime, as well as the field medic and accidental life-saver to countless numbers of comrades, if I do say so myself…as well as tamer of Konoha's legendary double-edged beauty. Yes, I think that I've lived my life thoroughly and well."

The last statement earns him a swat on the head with a pillow, despite the smile of said double-edged beauty.

Genma takes refuge behind a pillow of his own. "Easy, now. But don't stress about it, Ten – after all, I have had much, _much _more time on this earth to fulfill all my goals."

"Oh, don't start on that again," Tenten retorts, flopping back and crossing her arms. She gazes up at the ceiling. "I know it's stupid, but sometimes I worry that I…I don't know. I'll die without realizing some hidden potential, or without completing something that I'm _meant _to do in my life."

Genma snorts eloquently, mirroring her pose. "Mid-life crisis?"

"…I'm twenty-five."

"And you've been a shinobi for more than half your life. You've reached a point where you wonder if you can go any further."

Tenten blinks. "You're philosophical."

"I've had years to figure out this theory," he points out.

"True," she acknowledges.

They sigh in unison, before Genma wraps an arm around Tenten. "Don't worry. It'll pass. And _you_, of all people, shouldn't worry. You are an exceptional kunoichi, after all."

Tenten kisses him on the cheek, before turning off the lamp. "Thanks for the flattery, darling," she teases. "Night."

But she doesn't sleep, instead hovering in an odd state between exhaustion and deep thought for the next few hours, Genma's words flickering throughout her mind. _You've reached a point where you wonder if you can go any further. _

Her goal as a genin was to be a legendary kunoichi, just like Tsunade-sama. Realistically, now, she knows that, to some extent, that dream will never be fully realized. Tsunade-sama specialized in chakra control and medical jutsu, and Tenten's skills as a kunoichi are just about as far from that as it is possible to get. Her strengths lie in a completely different area.

Weaponry. Once, Gai-sensei had told her that if the village records were to believed, she was the first true weapons master in Konoha in several generations. The last recorded individual had been a male named Kohaku, back in the times of the Shodaime. She is the first weapons specialist to be admitted into ANBU, as well…

Tenten rolls over and pounds her pillow, frustrated. All that doesn't seem to _matter, _right now. If she was to die tomorrow, she would like to go out feeling like she had completed her path and purpose in life. And at this moment, she isn't quite sure that she has. What's left for her to do?

After flopping over on her back, she closes her eyes. Several disconcerting thoughts flit through her mind, and before long, she forces herself into a state of restless sleep.

Tenten sees her twenty-sixth birthday, almost exactly a year later, before her dreams are realized.

Shiranui Miyazaki has dark brown hair, her mother's eyes and her father's small nose. Genma has a tendency to waltz about with joy while cradling her, and during a rare quiet moment between the three of them, Tenten takes her oldest kunai out and very carefully hands it to her three-week-old baby girl as she lies in her crib.

Miyazaki curls her small fingers around the worn leather handle with difficulty, but somehow, the weapon remains balanced in her hand. Her tiny, curious face is reflected in the blade.

Tenten claps her hands, and Genma laughs delightedly.

After he puts the baby to sleep, Genma walks out to the balcony, to find Tenten sitting on the railing, displaying her usual lack of regard for perfectly serviceable lawn chairs. He links an arm around her waist, and pulls her in for a kiss. "Ten," he says, after a few minutes of silence. "Are you…content…now that we have her?"

Tenten nods against his shoulder. "It's hard to explain," she replies at last. "But, well, after seeing little Hizashi, and Maito, the tiniest edition of the Green Beast, I guess I just wanted a kid without realizing it. I just knew I wanted _something, _something indefinable, without knowing exactly what I was striving toward." She shrugs wryly. "I was never the most motherly type as a little girl. But somehow, I needed her."

Genma smiles. "You're doing just fine. And it's a nice feeling to know that we're raising one of Konoha's brightest and most promising future kunoichi."

Later that night, as she gets ready for bed, Shiranui Tenten looks around the room, and sees her ANBU mask and katana hung up above the bed. She sees her summoning scrolls, and the countless weapons, the shuriken, the kunai, the nunchaku, the bo, the tri-sectional staff, the tessen, the sais…the weapons that she has lived and almost died by, these past fourteen years.

She sees her baby daughter, sleeping peacefully in her crib. She sees her husband, untying his forehead protector for the night and laying it reverently by the bedside, before raising an eyebrow and holding out his hand to her.

For the first time in maybe her entire life, Tenten feels really, truly complete.

**Clouds**

Tenten has been known to relax by lying in dark meadows at night and finding the constellations of the zodiac flitting about each other, illuminated by the silvery light of their celestial glow. She finds it one of the best kinds of unwinding, and she is completely content with it.

Maybe it starts after her first chuunin exam, when she first encounters that lazy Nara Shikamaru, of the Rookie Nine's Team Ten. She can't fault his brilliant intellect, use of battle tactics, and strategy, but for the _life of her, _she simply cannot understand what the boy finds so enchanting about the daytime sky.

She brings it up in conversation with Ino and Sakura one day over lunch, and the two younger kunoichi both laugh. "It's the clouds," Ino explains, rolling her eyes. "He's absolutely obsessed with them. I don't see what's so damned fascinating about fluffy white things flying about in the sky, but there you go. That's Shikamaru for ya."

"He finds shapes in them," sighs Sakura. "Once, he ended up in the hospital for a head injury, and just as I was explaining how he had used his intended technique wrong, leading to the injury, he was just drifting off, staring at the clouds. After I hit him a couple of times he snapped out of it and showed me the cloud shaped…fluffy puppies."

Tenten blinks. "Well. Isn't that…interesting."

"I swear, he sees _everything_ in the clouds," Ino says grumpily, spearing a piece of tomato. "Fluffy puppies, shuriken, deer, lions…sometimes I don't know whether he's more abstractly brilliant than all the rest of us know, or if he just hallucinates the lot of it."

They all laugh and move on to less ambiguous topics, such as how absolutely brilliant Hatake Kakashi must look without his mask on, but Tenten's interest is piqued.

After lunch, she decides to do some experimenting on her own. Taking her leave of Ino and Sakura, she takes off, heading toward the meadow on the other side of Konoha, where she's heard that Team Ten does their training.

Tenten has never been here before, but as she makes her way past the last tree and lands, lightly, in the meadow, her first thought is that _this_ meadow beats theirs. It's more isolated, for one thing, and it isn't surrounded by forest as Team Gai's is. From where she stands, she has an unbroken view of long, swaying green grass, and the wildflowers that grow among them, studding the green with sudden bursts of pink, yellow, and blue color. There is a light breeze, and the air smells fresh and flowery. It is completely silent, save for the sound of wind through grass, and the echoes of faraway birdsong.

The weapons mistress can't help but sigh with envy.

After a few more minutes of wandering around aimlessly, enjoying the view, she decides to get right down to business. Tenten sits down awkwardly. "How does one go about watching clouds?" she asks herself.

"Simple," a voice above her comments dryly. "It's not really that hard. Just lie down on your back and lose yourself to nature."

Tenten looks up, blinking. Growing up in a shinobi village has accustomed her to voices popping up at the most unusual times and unlikeliest of places. Therefore, she isn't too surprised at the sight of none other than Nara Shikamaru, reclining lazily on a tree branch roughly ten feet above her head.

His eyes are closed again, and with the dappled sunlight shining against his dark green and black clothing, she can almost lose him in the canopy of leaves. "Pardon?"

One eye cracks open, as he peers down at her. "You're new to this, aren't you?"

Tenten draws herself up to her full height, feeling slightly ruffled without knowing why. "Yes, I prefer to—"

"Gaze at the stars by night and interpret fate in your free time, yes," Shikamaru cuts in. "Team Gai's astrologist."

The ruffled feeling is fading quickly into an almost flattered look. "Thank you."

With a deep sigh, Shikamaru flips down from the branch in a practiced, easy movement, landing on his feet with a lazy, catlike grace. He straightens, and Tenten notes with surprise that he is almost taller than she is. "Tenten." He nods toward the blue, blue sky, and her gaze follows his. "You'll find that cloud gazing, as it may be, is a lot less structured than what you are accustomed to viewing in the night sky."

"And that means…?"

Shikamaru yawns. "Let your imagination run unbridled." He strolls away from the tree cover, and Tenten follows curiously, keeping a small distance between herself and this interesting boy.

He comes to a stop in the center of the meadow, so that the sun shines down on them, and the sky seems to stretch into eternity from all directions. Which it does, she supposes.

Without further ado, Shikamaru collapses in a boneless heap.

Tenten almost shrieks in surprise, but keeps herself upright, peering down cautiously into his face. He seems all right…

Shikamaru cracks an eye open. "Well, what are you doing, woman?" he inquires grumpily. "The view's much better from down here."

Feeling a little bemused, but at home nevertheless, Tenten sits, and then eases herself down onto her back, so that she and Shikamaru are within touching distance of each other.

They lie in silence for a while, basking in the relaxing warmth of the sun, until a cloud passes over it, casting them in temporary shadow. "It looks remarkably like a giant bullfrog, that one," Shikamaru says at last.

Tenten looks at the misshapen cloud dubiously, but her expression softens into a smile as she notices the similarities.

The beginnings of an unlikely partnership, to be sure. But, even after years have passed, on certain sunny days, one might find the Godaime's head tactician skipping work in order to lie in the sun and muse about what an uncanny similarity a certain cloud bears to one Uchiha Itachi's head, as a member of Konoha's ANBU assassination squadron, her mask and katana set aside, giggles and points out more innocent and friendly cloud shapes.

**Sky **

Tenten's first experience battling a _real_ Akatsuki missing-nin, as in, one that isn't the product of a well-placed substitution jutsu, ends up involving herself throwing giant spiked bombs at a rather insufferable blonde _pretty boy _who insists on flying about on his giant clay bird, gloating about the destruction he plans to unleash on them all.

Tenten despairs.

While she fights alongside her teammates, though, she can't help but feel jealous of that stupid Akatsuki, though – she would love to be able to fly about above the land on her very own bird. She would be able to do so many wonderful things—

Tenten dodges and rolls away from a clay bomb. _Wonderful things that _don't _involve kidnapping Kazekages and trying to blow up innocent kunoichi, you blonde bastard!_

The battle is over almost too soon after that, after the cloaked missing-nin attempts to turn himself into a human bomb, and Neji orders them all out of there.

As Tenten flees with the rest of her team and Team Kakashi, she reflects almost bitterly upon what a dreadful waste of talent _Deidara _of Akatsuki is. She thinks about coupling those clay-animation skills and ability to make live, flying animals, with her own weapons abilities, and has to restrain herself from sighing wistfully at what a wonderful combination and attack formation that could entail.

In the weeks after her return to Konoha, Tenten has several completely irrational dreams about flying around on the back of a clay bird.

It is a year after she makes jounin when she encounters Deidara again. He is as irritating during battle as ever, and this time, he is accompanied by an orange-masked _idiot _who reminds Tenten, almost incongruously, of a slightly skewed version of their own Uzumaki Naruto.

Somehow, their fight ends up turning one-on-one for a brief period of time. Tenten learns two new things about Deidara in this period of time.

Well, she supposes that she's always known that he is an immensely skilled fighter. If anything, his proficiency seems to have improved over the years.

It's a good thing hers has too, she reflects grimly, as she bends over backward to avoid the rain of senbon he flicks toward her.

Tenten learns the other thing about Deidara almost at the end of their battle. He has managed to overpower her, outmaneuvering her spiked bombs, and slamming her against the solid body of his giant clay bird. Tenten chokes and gasps with surprise at the suddenness and strength of the impact. She feels the bird's cool, clay body through the tear in the back of her shirt.

Deidara's face is an inch from her own. He could kill her right now if he so chooses. Instead, he raises an eyebrow. "Like my bird, pretty Leaf kunoichi? If circumstances were different, I might ask you if you wanted to take a fly with me."

It is then that Tenten learns that, among other things, Deidara is a bad flirt.

Her response is to punch him in the stomach. Hard. He topples back against the nearby tree, and Tenten strolls over to him. It is her turn to place her face an inch from his and flutter her eyelashes. "If circumstances were different, I might consider it."

Deidara is injured, his lovable idiot of a teammate is probably in a pinch with a few Konoha shinobi, considering Tobi's screams of anguish, and yet, he finds it in himself to smirk at the compliment from a pretty girl. "I'll wait for your answer when we meet again…Tenten."

Before Tenten can do much more than blink, Deidara gives a sharp whistle, before disappearing in a puff of smoke, taking his magnificent clay bird with him. From the nearby yells of frustration and a similar puff of smoke, she judges that Tobi has vanished as well.

Their mission has failed. Two Akatsuki members have slipped out of their grasp yet again. The jounin team finds their way back to their village, tread heavy with defeat.

Neji can't help but notice that his female teammate seems to be…smiling vaguely, despite their recent failure. Smiling vaguely at the sky. Fearing head trauma, he asks cautiously, "Tenten? What's wrong?"

Tenten shakes herself out of her reverie, instead directing the smile at him. "Nothing. Nothing at all."

Neji turns away, unconvinced. True enough, after about a minute or so, Tenten's gaze slips skyward again, and the vague smile returns. He shakes his head. _Women. _

**Heaven**

Contrary to popular belief, Team Gai doesn't spend all their spare time training together, in order to perfect their skills as one of the best, most finely honed killing units in all of Konoha.

No, they can fit that in during the average workday.

Despite their diverse array of interests, Neji, Lee, and Tenten all have something that they have in common, even in their off time. Neji likes perusing cookbooks in quiet seclusion, Lee is always searching for newer manuals on taijutsu skills, as well as an interesting book on mythology or two, and Tenten simply adores any good astronomy books.

There is only one place in the entire village that can accommodate their varied hobbies, and one day every week, the three of them retreat to Konoha's library. There is a small area right behind the astronomy shelves, with three squashy armchairs in varying states of dilapidation, a rickety old coffee table, and a hideous, moth-eaten red rug.

This is probably one of Tenten's favorite places in the world.

Neji takes the oldest and most battered armchair, curling up into a small ball in the center of it, while littering any available space on the chair with a formidable array of books on foreign cuisine. Lee usually sits on the one-armed chair beside him, although by the end of the evening, he generally ends up sprawled on the rug, eyes wide open and with a starry expression as he rereads some of his favorite myths. Tenten makes herself comfortable on the lumpy armchair – after all, she gets so absorbed in her reading that after a while, she forgets the odd cushioning of the chair.

During one such evening, Lee breaks the silence with a loud gasp. "Amazing! It cannot be so!" he exclaims.

Neji gives a pronounced start, his deep reverie about the proper baking of the perfect cheesecake interrupted. In irritation to the highly amused look that Tenten gives him, he flings the nearest cookbook at his teammate's head. "Shut up."

"But Neji!" Lee rolls up into a cross-legged position, pulling the heavy mythology volume into his lap. "I have unearthed an interesting fact about none other than somebody we hold very near and dear!"

Tenten giggles at the enthusiastic expression on his face, marking her page in the book of the Chinese zodiac. "Out with it, then."

"Tenten," Lee begins. "Do you know of any particular meanings for your name?"

"Here and there," Neji interrupts, looking up from the cheesecake instructions. "Obviously."

"Right," nods Tenten, looking slightly confused.

Lee flashes her a thumbs-up. "That is only a very…literal translation of it, Tenten! According to this volume right here, your name may be translated as _gift falling from heaven._" Lee beams, obviously proud of his information-gathering skills.

Tenten blinks, and blushes slightly. "Wow, Lee, I didn't know."

Neji chooses this moment to insert his opinion. "Falling from heaven? _Her_? Lee, I doubt you've ever seen her weapons attacks. There are few things less heavenly—"

Neji gets a book thrown at his head for his troubles.

**Hell**

Even though she glares at him until he apologizes, Tenten has to admit that there is some truth in that memorable statement of Neji's, even though she doesn't realize it until several years later.

She is going into an undercover mission, infiltrating a ball thrown by a suspected crime lord. Lee and Neji are to be her backup, waiting outside, ready to jump in if anything goes wrong, or if the opportunity to catch the lord red-handed arises.

"I really hate doing this, you know," Tenten grumbles, as Lee fastens the neck clasp of her blue Chinese-style gown. "It tries my impatient soul."

"Well," Neji points out, tightening his forehead protector in the full-length mirror, "you are far less suspicious than either one of us. The Hyuuga clan has always been known for its allegiance to Konoha, and Lee…well…Lee going to a formal party unattended. Not going to happen anytime soon."

Tenten can't help but snort, while Lee makes his misunderstood-puppy face. "Of course."

"There, Tenten," Lee announces, after delicately sticking a decorative ivory comb into her unbound hair. "You are ready! Team Gai, assemble!"

Neji comes to stand at her back, and Tenten looks at their unlikely reflection in the mirror – Neji in his austere-looking Hyuuga robes, Lee clad as usual in green spandex and vest, and herself, looking rather incongruous in her borrowed finery and carefully applied cosmetics.

As she watches, Lee strikes a thumbs-up and a blindingly bright grin. "Fighting formation!"

"…Which means Lee and I go outside, and you meet your escort outside," Neji supplies dryly. He pats Tenten on the shoulder. "Good luck, not that you'll need it."

Tenten smiles. "Thank you for your confidence."

When they are both gone, and she is left alone with her reflection, she leans close to the mirror, pressing her fingertips against her mirror image, feeling oddly curious and fascinated.

It is an odd feeling, looking at herself, and seeing somebody so very normal. The girl in the mirror looks so average, like you would see a million people just like her walking down the streets of the Fire Country.

Then you take a closer look, and you see a little more. Maybe she isn't so average. Her posture alone speaks volumes. She stands tall, even without the high heels, and carries her head high, proud. She looks like somebody with a lot of confidence and strength to spare.

Her eyes tell you the most – determined, stubborn, unwilling to back down without a fight.

If you are trained to see such things, you can see the years of disciplined training, the careful, deadly precision in every movement that comes with years of being a shinobi.

Those things are buried beyond the surface, though. Skin-deep, she could pass for being average. Not many people could hope to guess at the nature of the true person that lies beneath. That is hidden underneath the fine dress, the elaborate jewelry, the precisely applied makeup, and the long curtain of dark brown hair.

Tenten can't help a slight smile, her rouged lips tugging upward.

No wonder Tsunade only wants certain kinds of people on these kinds of missions.

Only a kunoichi can truly raise hell and look damn good while doing it.

("That's why you're the prize of the species," Genma teases her playfully, and Tenten swats at him, but smiles nevertheless.)

¤

Reviews appreciated!

(and the next chapter will be the final one.)


	10. ten

**Note:** As always, thank you to everybody who reviewed. :)

¤

**Sun**

Tenten loves life with the breathtaking intensity that only a shinobi used to walking in the face of danger can. There are some days when, above all, despite everything else, she just feels a complete, sheer joy to be alive.

The sun shines down, soaking her through with its golden, warm heat. It reflects against the metal of her weapons, glinting white-hot daggers of their own; filters through the leafy canopy of her clearing, dappling the ground she stands on with flecks of sunlight. The breeze teases the leaves of the trees as they rustle softly.

"Tenten?" Neji asks, pausing for a moment in the execution of his Eight Trigrams. "Are you all right?"

Tenten looks up at him; at the way the light turns the dark brown of his hair into a warm shade of chocolate, and smiles. "Never better."

**Moon; Waves**

Team Gai has a dirty little secret: They aren't _always _as mission-conscious as they would like people to believe.

That would explain why Gai is guarding the lord as he sleeps, leaving Neji, Tenten, and Lee to have a precious few hours to themselves – to unwind, he explains, after a very vexing mission.

Tenten has been on her share of missions that are bloody, torturous, painful, extremely dangerous, or of extreme importance to her village.

This, however, is not one of them.

Lee has bounded into the ocean at the first possible opportunity, after a straight mile's sprint down the beach. He throws himself into the water with a joyful yell loud enough to wake the dead – or at least, that's how it seems, in the still, moonlit night in the Land of Waves. He is now demonstrating to Tenten that it is, indeed, possible to bodysurf.

Neji turns up his nose at the idea of bodysurfing, preferring instead to use his Byakugan to comb the seashore for the prettiest seashells.

Tenten's pants are rolled up to above the knee as she stands on the shore. The breeze is gentle but persistent, bringing with it the smells of the sea. From what she can see, aside from the shirtless and happily surfing Lee, it is completely black, tinged with specks of starlit silver. The reflection of the full moon ripples on the water not too far from her.

"You look like you want to catch it." Lee tumbles in on the surf, washed in by a wave. He sounds breathless and he has seaweed in his hair, but his smile is still bright enough to be almost blinding.

Tenten can't help but smile. "Which isn't really too far from the truth." She is standing at the very edge of the shore, where the breaking waves only cascade a light sheen of water over her bare feet as they sink into the sand. So, feeling only slightly foolish, she takes first one step into the slightly chill water, then another, and another, until she notices, with a pleasant shivery feeling, that she is standing in the very center of the moon. She is knee-deep in the ocean, and she actually sees the reflected silver light ripple against her calves and feet, and, when she looks down into the water, she sees the reflection of her face, wide-eyed and pale, gilded in the finest coat of silver.

Neji can't help but smile, as he returns from his seashell venture. "I'm sure you feel very accomplished, Tenten."

Lee cheers, from his spot sprawled on the sand. Tenten turns around and waves to her land-bound companions again, and he grins. "That's our Tenten – always reaching for the stars."

**Hair**

Tenten would rather die than admit to Genma (probably because he'd ruffle her hair and say that she is unbearably cute), but through the entirety of her official ANBU induction, her spine tingles and the hair on the back of her neck stands up. There are so many emotions coursing inside her, through her veins as if they have infused her blood itself, that she cannot even put a name to all of them.

The pride. Honor. The knowledge that she has truly achieved her lifelong dream – to be an exceptional kunoichi, one of the best. The knowledge that all of it, the countless hours training, sweating, fighting, bleeding, have finally paid off.

Tenten has never felt better.

**Supernova**

It is an old Hidden Mist custom, from the land of Sayaka's ancestors. Deep down, the former Mist kunoichi knows that not _too _much stock should be held in these ancient rituals, but that doesn't stop her from setting the table on the night of her Tenten's first birthday. Part of her wishes, with a pang, that she could use her family's traditional materials for this, but as they had made clear to her, she has no place with them anymore.

Sayaka purchases the necessary objects at a street market in Konoha, with the exception of the kunai.

She sets Tenten down in front of the table, supporting her on her feet gently. The baby gazes at the unfamiliar things, their bright, interesting colors reflected in her curious brown eyes.

It doesn't take long for Tenten to stretch her pudgy little arm toward what she wants, insistently straining forward, against her mother's grasp. Sayaka holds her little girl, and swallows, trying to ignore the sudden constriction of her throat.

"It's all right," she tells her daughter softly. "I know. You don't have to push yourself yet."

Tenten's eyes are fixated on the kunai, the pen and the yen piece forgotten. The bright silver and precise fascinates some corner of her baby mind, and Sayaka relents, loosening her hold ever so slightly.

She watches as her daughter's tiny fingers clasp around the firm leather handle of the kunai, her eyes solemnly traversing the length of the blade.

Sayaka lets Tenten observe the kunai until the baby yawns, releases her hold on the leather hilt reluctantly, and returns of her own accord, snuggling up to her mother's neck.

She strokes the downy cap of sepia-colored hair, and presses a kiss to her cheek. "I'm sure we are going to see great things from you, little Tenten."

(She has no idea how right she is.)

(Unsurprisingly, Tenten always believed in people choosing their own destiny.)

¤

Well, there you go. The complete fifty themes on our favorite weapons mistress, Tenten. :D This started out as just an experiment, but as it wore on, I found myself getting really attached to Tenten, because she's just _that _awesome and lovable, haha.

Thank you so much to everybody who's left feedback for this fic. It's great to hear you guys' comments.

…Reviews appreciated!


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